Throughout these pages I have given very little attention to the herbal sections of the Voynich ms.
This is despite the fact herbal pages occupy a good portion of the work. (And despite the fact I have some life-long expertise in the matter.)
Like others, I have spent unconscionable hours attempting to identify the botany depicted in the Voynich illustrations, with very meager results.
In the whole manuscript there are only a handful of herbs upon which there is even modest agreement. There are no certain, uncontested and unproblematic identifications.
It soon becomes evident that this is not a simple herbal, and the illustrations are not intended for identification. Nor do they aim for botanical accuracy. Indeed, many may not be real plants at all.
There is something else going on.
In this respect, as in others, the manuscript defies the experts and is profoundly perplexing. Many compotent herbalists – thoroughly trained in European herbal medicine – have not been able to make much sense of the herbal illustrations.
Once again, as in so many aspects of the Voynich mystery, I suspect the problems are conceptual.
* * *
In traditional herbalism we talk about the doctrine of signatures. At its simplest, this proposes that red flowers carry the signature of Mars, the red planet. Typically, colours, shapes and other associations are used to detect the signature of one or other of the planets.
This is what we go looking for in the Voynich ms., because it is the medieval norm, but we fail to find it.
For a start, the planets do not feature in the Voynich cosmology at all. The Voynich cosmology is conspicuously zodiacal.
But even then there is no depiction of correspondences between human anatomy and zodiacal signs, no tracing of zodiacal signatures in the familiar way.
The whole implication of the work is that the herbs correspond in some way to the stars and stellar cycles, but what system of correspondence is being used?
That, finally, is the riddle of the Voynich herbalism. It is clearly a premodern astrological herbalism.
But it is not the astrological herbalism with which we are familiar from other medieval and ancient works. It is not the standard astrological herbalism.
We are doubly confounded, then. As modern people it is hard for us to acquire the mindset that underpins and permeates traditional herbalism, and in this case we encounter a way of thinking that is itself eccentric and unusual.
How is the Voynich author thinking about herbs and their relations to the stars and the celestial order?
The answer must be: in a medieval way. (Which is to say, not in a modern way. We have to surrender all modern assumptions.) Yet not in the usual medieval way.
* * *
It is a difficult task.
Currently, to get autobiographical for a moment, I work part-time at a wholesale nursery that stocks 150+ Mediterranean plants. In this intimate engagement with plants I constantly endeavour to find non-modern ways to conceptualize botany. Moreover, my son is a professional horticulturalist.
I am in the position to take the images of the Voynich botany and transpose them to a living setting, not for the purposes of identification, but for the purposes of understanding how plants work.
If we put aside all modern scientific understandings, how did premodern people understand plants?
It takes a long while to reacquire premodern sensibilities.
And in the case of the Voynich ms. we must also place the herbs within the framework provided by the cosmological sections of the work – a premodern cosmological perspective.
Non-planetary. Again: this is not a herbalism based on the planets. It is, evidently, a herbalism based on the zodiac and the fixed stars.
The important thing to realize is that the Voynich herbs are not a game of identification.
It is a mistake to step right into that game and to waste time trying to identify them.
Rather, we need to consider the Voynich herbs as illustrative of a premodern botany. The images are not about this or that herb (that immediately needs to be identified) but rather about how plants work, botanical processes.
The Voynich ms. is not a catalogue of herbs. It is a catalogue about herbs.
* * *
The illustrations are full of botanical anomalies. This is what makes identification so hard. If we think we can identify a flower, the roots or leaves don’t match.
The plant on 65r (which looks rather like Jimson weed, but that is a New World plant) displays anomalous growth.
To the left this plant grows new stems alternately. On the right the same plant grows stems from the same node. That is impossible.
This is one herb page I have discussed previously, here.
The anomaly is deliberate.
What it tells us is that the author (the herbalist) is interested in how plants divide as they grow.
In this illustration (65r) there is the observation that plants divide in two ways: either from alternate or from the same node.
When we turn to other Voynich herbs we can see the same interest. Many illustrations put on display leaf, root or stem divisions. Root divisions receive particular attention.
That is, the Voynich herbal pages are like a catalogue of types of division found in plants.
There are different types of root systems, different leaf shapes, different stem patterns, different flower shapes. These are being catalogued, but not necessarily assembled into the depiction of coherent, natural plants.
Types of division, of course, are often a key to plant identification, but that is not the point here.
Rather, there is an interest in plant morphology, and especially the way plants grow from nodes.
We see this in the illustrations where, it seems, plant roots have been cropped and new growth appears.
This is horticultural, but it draws attention to the most important part of any plant: the crown (or what Alan Chadwick, the master gardener, called the presentiment.) This is the point, at the interface of air and soil, where plants divide into root and stem. It is the nucleus of the plant, where two different types of vascular systems – root and stem – emerge and separate.
I suggest that, for the author/herbalist, the matter of interest is that this is the point of division: juncture, schism, bifurcation.
The presentiment is the primal node.
* * *
This invites an entirely different way of looking at plants.
We tend to think of a plant as a discrete object, but it can be thought of as a process. We can think of a plant as a system of divisions extended over time.
(Just as we could conceptualize a plant as water in slow motion.)
And this, in turn, invites astrological correlations.
This is a far more sophisticated approach than simply matching red flowers to a red star. Instead, the signature of the heavens is written into the growing habits of the plant and specifically in its habits of division.
Remember: we are dealing with a zodiacal astrology, not planetary.
The zodiac is a system of divisions. To create the zodiac we divide the solar year in two, then in half again. Then we divide the quarters. It is a process of staged divisions (that can all be made with a compass.)
I think this is likely to be the point of correlation between the plants and the heavens.
The astrological herbalism of the Voynich ms. concerns correlations between the divisions of the zodiac and the divisions observed in plants as they grow. Plants grow by dividing.
This herbalism is nodal.
It is not easy to think of plants in this (prescientific) way, but it is entirely legitimate in itself. It gives a good account of plants.
* * *
I have no idea if this has immediate precedents. Many things in the Voynich ms. are unprecedented.
It is not an approach with which I am familiar from the usual ancient herbal texts, but it is an extensive literature if we extend it into the Middle Ages and I have hardly read it all.
I suspect, though, that it is not a bold innovation but rather it participates in a long but somewhat obscured tradition that will have literary traces, perhaps in Arabic botanical works.
It is probably there. I am just unaware of it.
It is important. On appearances, after all, the Voiynich ms. is about herbs, in the first instance. It is a herbal. The work is about this way of looking at herbs. It is why, we might dare say, the work was written in the first place.
It seems likely to me that there is a text upon which this is based – how the growth patterns of herbs reflect celestial patterns, how the divisions of plants reflect celestial divisions - to which the author had access.
R.B.
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