Reposted here, with a few amendments, from Voynich Ninja:
If the Voynich manuscript has been modelled upon the Lapidary of Alfonso, or a similar medieval lapidary, presenting an account of stellar correlations to botany rather than to gemstones, we would expect to find 360 plants in the Voynich presentation.
In the Lapidary there are 360 gemstones, one for each degree of the ecliptic and by extension one for each of 360 stars.The proposal is that the Voynich author has set out to do to the plant realm what the Lapidary does to the mineral realm.
But there is a strong objection: there are not 360 plants in the Voynich manuscript, even allowing for missing pages.
How many plants are there? I count 129. There are 110 in the first section up to f57v. There are a few strays, and there is the section known as Herbal B, another 14. Making 129. A few pages arguably show two plants.
There might have been others on missing pages, but not many. Certainly not another 231 to make a complete set of 360, one plant per degree. We could perhaps conjure a set of 180 at a stretch.
Much more reasonable would be a proposal that the first herbal (botanical) catalogue amounted to 120 plants. 110 are extant, but folios 59 to 64 are missing. When the text resumes at 65r there are three more botanical pages. This suggests there were botanical pages among the missing folios.
With the extra three, there is therefore 113 plants, and enough missing pages for there to be seven more. (Leaving Herbal B out of the equation.)
Such an arrangement would require that each plant in the set represents 3˚ - 3 x 120 = 360.
This is the only astrologically coherent grouping that seems likely.
But the parallel with the Lapidary of Alfonso fails on this account. Evidently, the Voynich ms. does not give an account of 360 plants after that model. Instead, it does present one nymph per degree. Despite a few anomolies, it is clear the work contains a system of 30 nymphs per zodiac sign.
This is after - or an extension of - the model of the Helios icon in the Brescia Canones. That work is the inspiration for the celestial nymphs - more properly the Naiads of Helios.
That there are 360 - the extension to 360 nymphs - is an idea from the Lapidary, as is the application of the astrology to botany, to complement the gemstones.
Thus, we see that the Voynich is a synthesis of ideas. It is not a simple (badly done) companion volume to the Lapidary. It is a companion volume to the Lapidary constructed through Ptolemy.
Presumably, the chain of causation was something like:
*There is an existing account (the Lapidary) of the mineral realm's associations with the 360 stars.
*The author desires to create a companion volume to this concerning botany.
*But how is botany matched to the 360 stars? How is this to be done?
*To accomplish this the author turns to Ptolemy. He believes the Brescia Canones to be an authentic ancient key to Ptolemy's astrology.
*The key to the Canones is the Helios icon, the key illustration of the work. Botany is under the rulership of Helios. Therefore, the author uses this Ptolemaic Helios system (a soli/stellar astrology) to extract a system of astrological botany.
*The author has tried to create a Ptolemaic botany in response to the need for a work that complements the existing account of minerals and gemstones.
It might have been a lot easier to just have 360 plants, but that is not the case.
Indeed, when it comes to plants, there is hardly a plant in the manuscript that actually looks like an identifiable plant. We are not presented with a catalogue of natural plants.
Many Voynich plants are actually botanically impossible, most are anomalous, and some seem like strange combinations of known plants. Some seem simply fantastic, the product of imagination, not observation.
Again: it might have been a lot easier to just have 360 plants, but something else is going on.
How does the identification of one of the 360 nymphs lead to a plant if there are not 360 plants? What is the relationship between the nymphs and the plants?
Presumably, the nymphs tend the plants? Although there are not shown doing so! In fact, among the illustrations, there is no direct connection between the nymphs and the plants. There are no nymphs on the botany pages and no plants on the nymph pages. Matching labels on nymph pages to words on botany pages, in search of a correspondence, has proven futile. Many have tried.
If the astrology of the work leads the reader to one of the 360 nymphs, what does she have to do with botany? Clearly, from the manuscript, she is not allotted one particular plant, or else there would be 360 plants matching the 360 nymphs.
The short answer to this problem seems to be: meteorology.
There is a meteorological dimension to the Voynich system that is lacking in the Lapidary. Weather, and seasons, after all, are not relevant to the nature or habitat of rocks, but they are to plants.
An astrological account of the mineral realm does not require an account of weather cycles or seasons: gemstones do not follow weather or seasonal cycles. Nor are they distributed in climatic zones.
But to give a corresponding account of the botanical realm, astrological influences upon weather and the turn of seasons becomes relevant. Plant life is distributed in climatic zones, follows seasons, and is especially dictated by rainfall.
This is the domain of the nymphs. They are naiads, water nymphs. The zodiacal nymphs are the nymphs of the celestial waters. When they distribute the celestial waters, the earth is irrigated and nourished.
Their connection to plant life, therefore, is indirect. The nymphs control the weather - specifically the rains - to which the botanical realm responds and of which it is a manifestation.
More completely, plants respond to sun and rain. Helios and his naiads.
Moreover, plant life is more plastic than rocks. Rocks are comparatively stable and fixed. Plant life is mutable. The same plant can grow quite differently in different climates, or under different rainfall or weather conditions. That is not true of gemstones.
Accordingly, there are not 360 distinct, stable and fixed forms of plants, as there are 360 gemstones.
Gemstones are, as it were, direct manifestations, or coagulations, or condensations, of the stars. That is not true of plants. The plant realm is a living expression of the changing cycles and moods of the heavens. Rocks are static, plants are dynamic.
Plants require a different application of the stellar astrology. It is not as straightforward as allotting one plant to each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. They are not gemstones.
This is all pure Ptolemy. Astrology and meteorology are wed and you cannot have botany without meteorology.
Going back to our presumed chain of causation:
*There is an existing account (the Lapidary) of the mineral realm's associations with the 360 stars.
*The author desires to create a companion volume to this concerning botany.
*But how is botany matched to the 360 stars? How is this to be done?
The Voynich author knows that it is not simply a case of nominating 360 plants, one for each degree. In the Ptolemaic worldview, plants are under the control of celestial cycles in a way that gemstones are not.
To produce a companion volume to the Lapidary, the Ptolemaic cosmos demands an account of astrological meteorology.
Our author has used the Canones of Ptolemy - and very likely an almanac based on Ptolemy's Phases of the Fixed Stars - to accomplish this. The essential idea is found in any farmer's almanac. When such-and-such star is rising, it brings rain, or not.
The resulting botany concerns the morphology of plants. Plant life, as I say, is plastic. If conditions change, the shape of the plant changes. In a drought it will be stunted, in good years flourish. Most obviously, the morphology of plants follows the cycles of the sun. As days lengthen seeds germinate, erupt into coteledons, then true leaves, stems, roots, flowers, fruits, before receding back into seed for the winter.
In the Voynich cosmology, the (stellar) nymphs shape this (solar) process by controlling the celestial waters upon which plant life depends.
Moreover, there are terrestrial nymphs, counterparts to the zodiacal nymphs. Naiads are creatures of lakes and rivers and streams and fountains and wells and subterranean waters. The Voynich ms. shows an account of terrestrial water nymphs (mountain nymphs) collecting and distributing the celestial rains controlled by the celestial nymphs.
Stellar influences are mediated through light and water.
It would seem, then, that the botanical presentations in the Voynich concern the mark of these influences upon plant morphology, not by way of 360 specific plants but by way of a catalogue of morphologies.
It is tempting to detect a system of 120 botanical pages with tripartite plants - 120 different types or patterns of root, stem/leaf and flower, making a catalogue of 360 morphologies in all.
This would still present the Voynich ms., as a companion to the Lapidary of Alfonso, but it is a much more elaborate extension of it than simply supplying 360 plants to match the 360 gemstones.
A catalogue of 360 plants would be inadequate, anyway. In the prescientific worldview it is conceivable there are only 360 gemstones in Creation, but there are clearly more than 360 plants. We might imagine 360 types of morphology - growth habits - found across the wide range of plants, though.
This is also to say the Voynich is not a "herbal" and, in fact, not a medical text at all. A herbal is restricted to medically useful plants. The botanica in the Voynich ms. does not conform to the usual set of medically useful plants, and there is no indication plants have been selected for their medical properties. (In many cases it looks like plants were selected for their interesting root systems!)
It is hard to imagine our author knew the Lapidary of Alfonso directly - he knew of its system - but he did know the Brescia Canones directly. If his objective was to produced a botanical 'Lapidary', the project took the form of an attempted reconstruction of a Ptolemaic astrological botany. The correlation between plants and the 360˚ of the ecliptic/zodiac is through the mediation of Helios and his Naiads, the cycles of the sun and the celestial waters.
