A few years ago a group - perhaps a gang - of botanists released a statement insisting that dozens of plants in the Voynich are likely to be New World plants, contra the official carbon dating.
This happens from time to time.
Solutions:
1. They are all wrong in every case.
2. Europeans were in the Americas way early and Columbus is a cover story.
3. The ms. dating is wildly wrong.
Most likely it is option 1., the botanists are hallucinating.
All the same, they still have a point. The Voynich botany is strange, and in some cases it is strangely like New World - and especially Central American - botany. The "sunflower" is the famous case.
How do we explain this without violating historical facts?
How do we explain the Voynich botany in general, and in particular how do we explain the plants that seem to be tropical and exotic, types of plants unknown in Europe?
* * *
One possibility follows from my proposal that the manuscript has been inspired by, extracted from, Ptolemy's Canones and its Helios cosmology.
Namely, the author has a central interest in different plants at different latitudes.
The whole Voynich system is essentially solar. Plants belong to Helios. Plant morphology is shaped by the cycles of the sun. Different latitudes (paths of the sun) produce different types of vegetation.
You don't have to travel to the north pole see this. You just have to go up a mountain. The latitudes are duplicated as you go up a mountain.
It is observable, for instance, that plants SCALE at latitudes. We find mini versions of plants at high altitudes, or huge versions of seedlings at low altitudes.
I have noted the matter of scale before regarding the Voynich botany. What is a sunflower but an overgrown daisy? A banana plant is a very large seedling that never grows up, never hardens into wood (as temperate zone plants typically do.) Maize is a giant grass. And so on.
Many New World plants resemble Old World plants at a different scale.
As a general proposition, the nearer to the Pole you are the smaller the scale of the plants, and the nearer the Equator the larger. The same (or related) plant will be tiny at one latitude but enormous at another.
Most obviously, there are annuals, biennials and perennials. The same plant can behave as an annual at one latitude, a biennial at another and be perennial at yet another.
It is possible, I suggest, that the Voynich author has imagined plants that in reality resemble plants from unknown latitudes.
The author has asked: What sort of botany has Helios created across the full reach of his cycle, north and south?
The author would try to imagine the typical morphology of tropical plants and plants from unknown latitudes.
It is an imaginary botany (for the most part) depicting the changes in plant morphology at different latitudes (which is also to say altitudes.)?
Is this possible? It is. It is entirely possible for an observant botanist, ancient or medieval, to infer that there will be giant flowers at southern latitudes, for example.
* * *
The difference between annuals, biennials and perennials is the most obvious correspondence between plants and the cycles of the sun.
We might expect such a basic distinction to be indicated in the text or illustrations.
There are circles divided into 24 sections in the manuscript. They could represent 2-year cycles?
A proper account of a solar botany requires a two-year cycle in order to accommodate (and explain) the phenemenon of biennials.
This is because many plants (biennials) require VERNALIZATION. They do not flower until they have experienced the (next) solstice. The solstice, then, is the trigger for the plant to grow to maturity, flower and seed.
(Such plants typically, by the way, form 'rosettes'.)
In horticulture, vernalization can be used to force plants to flower, to manipulate its life cycle or - against the gardener's wishes - it can cause plants to 'bolt'.
Some plants, in their life cycle, need to be exposed to the solstice.
I suspect that this might be a particular concern of our author/botanist. Conceivably, this is what we see in many plant depictions where roots in particular have been vernalized and their 'bolting' to flower is recorded.
The author is interested in the correspondences between solar cycles and plant morphology: in that case vernalization becomes a phenomenon of obvious focus.
It matches the other preoccupation we witness in the botany: a focus on the crown or presentiment of the plant, noted in previous posts on these pages, which, in the plant, is, as I have argued, the point corresponding to the solstice.
The word "vernalization" might suggest something to do with the vernal equinox. It is a slight misnomer. It concerns the solstice. But more generally, vernalization might mean the sensitivity of plants to the quartering of the year, the cycle of solstices and equinoxes. The solstice provides the trigger and then the plant bolts towards and exhausts itself in the equinox.
* * *
A book that is enormously illuminating and that should be on the reading list of every student of the Voynich botany is The Plant: A Guide to Understand its Nature, by the aptly named G. Grohmann.
Grohmann presents an extremely intelligent and deft account of plant life from a viewpoint still sensitive to premodern cosmology.
This is the type of approach to botany and herbalism that most nearly reflects what we see in the Voynich manuscript.
(It comes out of Goethe's little masterpiece, The Metamorphosis of Plants, another essential work for these studies. Frankly, if you have studied Voynich botany for any length of time and have not been led to Goethe's The Metamorphosis of Plants, you've been led astray and will remain clueless.)
In Grohmann, you can ignore the Anthroposophy and go for the Goethe. The task is to shed all the assumptions of modern botany and to reacquire a premodern understanding of plants. (In Goethe, you can ignore the Romanticism and go for the medievalism.)
If we start with the modern conceit that people in the past were stupid, primitive, unsophisticated or at best proto-scientific - the worldview of Scientism - then we will fail to understand the nature of the manuscript and its contents at the most fundamental level.
The constant refrain of these pages is: the problems with the Voynich manuscript are conceptual. In this instance, the work requires that we reconceptualize botany.
R.B.
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