Category Archives: The Voynich Map

Investigations of the large fold-out “map” page.

The Portal Gate

25 March 2020

In medieval times, people walked. Many cities were completely walled and you entered by the portal gate. Some cities had only one entrance. Some had three or four. If there was only one, it was important to know where it was or you could approach from the wrong side and spend hours or days backtracking along treachorous mountainous paths or deep forest.

To make it easier to recognize the gate from a distance, certain “signal” styles were adapted by builders and architects, many of which were specific to their region. It was common to build a tower, or a pair of towers, over the main portal. The extra height let the watchmen see who was coming, and visitors knew where to approach.

Example of travelers approaching the main entrance to a walled medieval city by spotting the distinctive portal gate.
Medieval portal entrances were designed with distinctive features and usually stood higher than the walls so watchmen could scan incoming traffic from a suitable height, and travelers could find the right entrance to walled cities. [Source: Eidgenössische Chronik, Cod. ZF 18, c. 1520s]

Portal-Tower Architecture

Most towers were built with brick and mud or stone according to local engineering and cultural traditions. Some had flat platforms, others had roofs.

The Canaanite Gate in Tel Dan is several thousand years old and currently under restoration (the doorway has not been fully excavated). It features a heavy wall and a single portal in the central recessed portion of a thick wall. The portal is within a broad arch that predates Roman arches by about 1,500 years. There may have been a higher central tower above the doorway at the time of original construction:

The ancient city gate called the Canaanite Gate or Abraham's Gate
The mud-brick Canaanite Gate in Tel Dan was built almost 4,000 years ago and features a thick wall, a higher portion above the portal (perhaps the remains of a tower), and an arched door-support. [Source: Hanay, Wikimedia]

This basic format, a strong wall, a central portal, and a raised platform or tower over the doorway was common to many countries.

There are a number of ancient gates in Bosra, in southwest Syria. They typically have arched doorways, but high towers above the gate are not usual.

The Gates of Istanbul are massive, with mostly-square towers, and very old. Some have been bricked up or restored over the years. This is the Belgrade Gate which still includes parts of the original wall:

Portions of the wall ran along the water and a chain was stretched over the canal to prevent undesired entry by boats.

Here are two examples of medieval tower portals from Cairo, Egypt. The well-fortified north-facing portal (left) has a platform and crenellations. The south portal (right) has elaborately carved minaret towers and stone roofs with sculptural finials:

The north and south gates of the old city of Cairo, Egypt.
The north-facing portal and south portal to the city of Cairo were built in two different styles in the 11th and 12th centuries. [Sources: Sailko and JMCC1, Wikipedia]

The bastion style on the left was a common style. It was designed for visibility and also for protection. It enabled guards to drop arrows, rocks, and burning oil onto anyone trying to storm the gate. This form of tower is often depicted in manuscript illuminations.

The Porta Soprana of Genoa, built in the 11th 12th century, is similar to the north-facing portal in Cairo, although not quite as massive. Between the two round towers, and on the top, are Ghibelline merlons, but it’s difficult to determine exactly when they were added. It is possible, in this case, that they are original, since this is one of the pockets where there were Ghibelline supporters, but since the portals were intended, in part, to assert the independence of Genoa, it’s questionable whether they would include a symbol specifically supporting the Holy Roman Empire:

The Porta Soprana portal in Genoa, built in the 12th century. [Source: Maurizio Beatrici, Wikimedia, 2016]

The little town of Münchenstein, on the northern Swiss border, had quite a simple portal with a square tower and crenellations:

The Augustus Arch, portal to Rimini, is very ancient and classical in design with an unusually large opening that probably never had a gate. The Ghibelline merlons were added in the 11th 10th century when the Ghibelline family took control of the city:

The Augustus Arch was originally built in the 1st century BCE and dedicated to Caeser Augustus by the Roman Senate. In the 11th 10th century, the Ghibelline merlons were added by the Ghibelline family. [Photo: Tobabi1, Wikipedia]

Gable Roofs

Sometimes towers had roofs similar to those on houses. A common style was the gable roof, seen in areas where ceramic or wooden roofs were added:

Examples of basic gable roof styles for buildings and towers
One of the roof styles used for medieval portal towers is the gable roof. In certain regions, the two ends of the roof-span sometimes included globe finials or flag finials.
Antique saddle with raised pommel and cantle [Source: The Met]

The span of a gable can vary. If it is a short-spanned gable with finials or raised peaks at either end, it is sometimes called a “saddleback” because of the resemblance to saddles with raised pommels and cantles (right).

Saddlebacks were common in Bohemia/Bavaria, Alsace, and parts of eastern France in the Middle Ages.

Historic Portals

The Butcher’s Tower (below) is a hip-style gable with inward-sloping sides and roofing materials on all four sides.

This picturesque watchtower was built in the 14th century, and stands above an entrance gate in a long wall.

Hip Gable "saddleback" roof on the Butcher's Tower, 1349, Ulm, Germany
Hip-gable style of “saddleback” roof with globe finials. The Butcher’s Tower, 1349, Ulm, Germany.

A similar style of portal can be seen in the Berner Chronik (Burgerbibliothek Mss.h.h.I.1), created between 1478 and 1483. It has a hip-gable saddleback roof with finials:

Example of a saddleback portal tower with finials in the Berner Chronik, created c. 1480.

The main difference between this and the Butcher’s Tower is that the Berner Chronik portal has a crenellated level where the stone ends and the roof begins. In some cases, towers started out unroofed and roofs were added later. In other cases, there is a crenellated balcony at the apex of the stone that was part of the design.

In this illustration, there are two entrance portals built along the water for accessibility by boat and for extra security. Both portal towers have saddleback roofs with globe finials, but the tower on the left has a viewing window and the one on the right has a covered walkway leading to the opening:

Examples of two forms of saddleback portal towers in the 15th-century Berner Chronik, c. 1480.
Two portal towers leading to the city, entered by crossing bridges, one plain, the other covered. Both have hip-gable roofs with finials. The arch-shaped extensions are similar to those on the Butcher’s Tower. [Source: Amtliche Berner chronik, Mss.h.h.I.1, c. 1480]

Postscript 29 March 2020: I forgot to add the following drawing when I posted this blog, but it’s worth including because it’s part of an extensive collection of town maps from the mid-15th century. The drawings of Guillaume Revel are generally more accurate than castle drawings in storytelling manuscripts because part of his purpose was to document ducal holdings.

Revel drew the town of Feurs around 1450. There are four saddleback portals, each with flag finials and, unlike most castle drawings, he included details of the archways and balcony just below the rooftops, a style that was fairly common in this area but not always elsewhere. Between the portals are semicircular wall towers with simple battlements:

The town of Feurs, France, documented in the 1450s by Guillaume Revel.
The walled town of Feurs in the 15th century is drawn here with four saddleback portal gates with flag finials. This detailed drawing was created as part of an armorial record by Guillaume Revel [source: BNF Français 22297]

The following examples of German towers include 1) double towers, one with a hip-gable saddleback on the left and a cone-shaped tower on the right, 2) a single tower with a saddleback roof and globe finials, and 3) a finial-topped cone tower surrounded by a balcony with battlements:

Examples of medieval portal tower styles.

The Prague “Powder Tower” is situated on one of the main city portals on the Charles Bridge. During the reign of Emperor Rudolph II, it housed some of the alchemists

It has a hip gable with globe finials and turrets in the corners, similar to the tower in the center diagram above, but the Powder Tower was not built until 1475 and I couldn’t find any clear pictures of the original tower it replaced.

Towers similar to the Powder Tower served as portals to the cities of Batteheim and Ensißhein.

Sometimes local architecture was used to illustrate events in far-off places. For example, Vatican Pal. Lat. 871, includes a biblical story of Ezechiel that obviously didn’t take place in central Europe, and yet the illustrator drew local architecture, including a pair of flag finials facing outward:

Manuscript Vatican Pal. lat. 871 illustration of a portal gate with flag finials.

On a side note… outside Ensißhein a meteorite boomed out of the sky and landed in a field November 1492. A number of woodcuts and drawings commemorating the event show a saddleback portal gate (a 15th-century drawing of Belgrade includes similar-looking portals):

Ensißhein (now Ensisheim) was immortalized in story and images in 1492 when it was struck by a meteorite. Citizens quickly started hacking off pieces, but an official intervened and preserved it for future generations.

Albrecht Dürer created elaborate allegorical engravings of the meteorite event replete with sun, moon, stars, cloudbands, angels, and people cowering in fear. Here are two examples:

Ensißhein meteorite event allegorically interpreted by Albrecht Durer
Albrecht Durer engraving of a meteorite event near Enseßheim that occurred in 1492.

Ensisheim is in eastern France, near the Swiss and German borders and I was intrigued by a more humble drawing of the meteorite event. People are pointing, birds are knocked out of their flight by the boom from the “thunderstone”, and animals scurry for their dens:

Meteorite falling to earth at Ansißhein in eastern France in 1492.
Meteorite blasting out of the sky with a loud boom, causing chaos November 1492 in the environs of the city of Ensißhein. [Courtesy of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, BAV Chigi G.11.36]

This illustration reminded me of the full-page drawing in the VMS that has multiple textures and emanations seemingly shaking the foundations of the earth. There is a person hiding or peeking out from behind a tor, a bird flapping by a cloudlike formation in the upper-right and another with wings raised as if to fly sits on the tor below.

I’ve already blogged about possible interpretations of this folio, and the Ensißhein meteorite event is probably too late to have influenced the VMS, but the fact that the folio has a narrative feel, like the Ensesheim drawings, makes me wonder if it chronicles a natural or mythical cataclysm:

Voynich Manuscript folio 86v image of birds, cloudlike formations and tall tors
Beinecke 408, the Voynich Manuscript, folio 86v, courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscripts Library at Yale.

Another meteorite hit the earth near Basel, Switzerland, in the 16th century but I wasn’t able to find any illustrations of similar events before the Ensisheim meteorite. There are some earlier drawings of “comets”, however, and since the word “comet” was used rather imprecisely at the time, maybe some of these sitings were meteorites.

U. dall’Olmo, in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1978, Vol. 9 searched medieval records for celestial events and describes a spectacular meteor shower in southern Italy in 1387 that was said to light up the sky. Three decades later, a meteor appeared after sunset and split into three while traveling west to east. If the VMS drawing has anything to do with meteor events, maybe it chronicles something earlier than the thunderstone of Ensesheim.

More on Portal Gates

Helpoort entrance portal by Ben Bender, Wikimedia Commons
Helpoort portal, photo by Ben Bender, Wikimedia Commons

Getting back to portal gate designs… the Helpoort gate in the Netherlands is a 13th-century entrance portal with an arched entrance, two round towers, and an asymmetric cone-shaped roof. I don’t know how old the finials are (they tend to wear and be replaced) but globe and flag finials were common in the middle ages.

In the 17th century, Reims was drawn with two saddleback portal gates flanked by a pair of round towers with cone roofs. A series of round towers, some roofed, some not, are spaced at intervals along the city wall.

When Adam and Eve are driven from Paradise in this manuscript from Switzerland, we see them exiting through the portal gate roofed with a hip gable and two flag finials:

Manuscript illumination, Adam & Eve driven from Paradise through a saddleback portal tower with flag finials.
Adam and Eve driven from the walled garden of Paradise through a traditional portal gate with a hip gable roof with a pair of flag finials. [Source: Bern, Burgerbibliothek Cod. A 45, c. 1480]

Roofs in the VMS “Rosettes” Folio

There are a number of corner towers and portal towers on the VMS “map” folio. The drawings are very tiny but still recognizable. The roofs are consistent with the styles of the towers and with each other.

On the lower side of the top-right rosette, there is a simple square tower facing the rosette, but the tall tower is probably also a portal tower that faces the pathway on the other side (imagine standing on the rosette and looking toward the “path” as though you are seeing it from the back). The central tower roof is a gable with flag finials facing outwards, a typical saddleback, flanked by cone roofs with globe finials (I think the finial on the right is probably a smudged globe finial, but it may possibly be a flag finial):

On a circular wall within the rosette, possibly at the top of a steep area, there is another saddleback tower apparently attached to the wall, but it doesn’t appear to have a portal opening. It may be a watchtower rather than an entry point.

This one has a hip gable and a pair of finials that are so small, it’s difficult to tell if they are flag or globe finials. If it’s a watchtower rather than an entrance tower, they are probably globe finials.

I think it’s very unlikely that the drawing below represents a lighthouse. Lighthouses were generally round and even if they were square near the bottom, as in some of the most ancient, the top was usually round so the signal fires could be seen from multiple angles. All through history, the majority of lighthouses were round or rounded (octagonal) at the top. Even the tower of Hercules transitions from square to octagonal to rounded as one reaches the top.

I have never seen a historic lighthouse with a saddleback roof and, in general, lighthouses were not attached to walls at the tops of hills. More often they were on prominences jutting out into the water closer at sea level, or they were on small islands or rock formations in or near the harbor. This looks like a typical wall-tower:

On the same wall, on either side of this tower, there are additional towers that appear to have cone roofs and finials. Moving to the left side of the rosette, facing another “pathway”, there is a wall castle or city with Ghibelline merlons, two unroofed towers, and a tall, narrow hip gable with finials:

Voynich Manuscript "map" folio showing saddleback towers and Ghibelline merlons, possibly on a steep hill.

Note also that the Ghibelline merlons are not on every side. The merlons on the left are the more common square merlons.

Pointed merlons are found in many areas of southern Spain, and if they are placed in pairs, they superficially resemble Ghibelline merlons, but they are not the same. The merlons on the VMS are straight on the outside and angled on the inside and join without reaching the base. The merlons in Spain are angled on two sides to create a different shape. There are some swallowtail merlons in Spain, but I haven’t found any that existed before the latter part of the 15th century.

Beyond this compound, to the left, there appears to be a walled pathway with buildings and towers at intervals. On the outsides of the walls are what appear to be steep escarpments, very similar in shape to certain geological formations and also similar to the escarpments created by mining operations. The buildings on the left look like houses and possibly a tower with finials. On the right is a platform tower with crenellations, possibly roofed. In the center is a faint tower with a cone roof that looks like it might have been partially erased:

Towers built into the walls above escarpments on the Voynich Manuscript "map" folio

Mining was quite extensive in the Middle Ages. Silver, gold, and other metals, along with desirable stones such as gemstones, granite, and marble, were so heavily mined that entire mountains were sometimes reduced to foothills. During the process, narrow terraces were often formed. This makes it difficult to know whether the lines that look like escarpments in the VMS are natural or manmade.

The next section in the top-left is quite detailed and it’s difficult to interpret the structures that appear to be inset into apparent hollows in the pathway:

VMS "map" folio tower in a hole and other architectural structures such as towers and buildings
Beinecke 408 Voynich Manuscript folio 86r foldout [Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts, Yale University]

The blue tower appears to be sitting on a steep tor with a spiral pathway to the top, and is colored to distinguish it from the structures under and around it. For this reason, I am reluctant to call the bumpy thing in the upper hole a building, as it is the same colors and textures as the “dirt” around the lower tower. My best guess at the moment is that the upper “hole” might be a cave entrance or a cutaway in a cliff as was sometimes created in the middle ages, with arched lookout points along the way.

Walls with Buildings

Walls with attached buildings were quite common in the Middle Ages. The way the path widens out where it appears to be steep is fairly common, as well, providing intermittent stopping places and viewpoints.

Tollhouses were installed at regular intervals on major rivers and paths, so the presence of a house attached to the wall might indicate a checkpoint or tollhouse.

At the bottom of the folio, we see a long wall of Ghibelline merlons, but no towers:

Long line of Ghibelline merlons at the base of the Voynich Manuscript "rosettes" folio.

This drawing of a wall in Constantinople, published 1580, has numerous attached towers, but they are shown with flat, unroofed, crenellated tops:

Old paintings of Florence, Italy, have towers similar to those in the illustration of Constantinople, with the exception of one portal tower that includes a low-profile hip-gable roof.

This image of Nuremberg published in 1493 includes numerous cone- and gable-style roofs, several with globe and flag finials:

Detail of the city of Nuremberg with a variety of roof styles and flag finials.

Burgdorf was drawn very similar to Nuremburg, with a variety of gable- and cone-style roofs. Note the tall tower with the saddleback roof is plainly visible even though trees obscure the gate. The buildings on the hill have flag finials (perhaps more than actually existed at the time but which were not uncommon in Switzerland and can also be found in Thun, south of Bern):

Medieval Burgdorf city walls and portal tower.

The way the portal-style towers and gates are positioned in the VMS, at significant junctions between landmarks and pathways, makes sense in the context of the Middle Ages, a time when there were many walled cities.

Real or Mythical?

But are they real or mythical? Should they be interpreted as actual places?

The “tower in the hole” has always made me wonder if the illustrator were suggesting a link to the underworld. Oceanus was said to swirl around the earth in nine rings (there are nine circular “rosettes”), which hints at the possibility of myth. When Psyche planned to throw herself off a tower after Aphrodite gave her an impossible task, it was the tower that told Psyche how to get to the underworld and back without losing her life. Is the tower-in-a-hole a conduit between this world and the one below?

Summary

Saddleback portal with two round towers with cone roofs.

As can be seen by some of the examples in this and other blogs, illustrations of far-off places or mythical events were sometimes drawn with local architecture. The illustrators guessed, or simply drew what they knew. This means that the saddleback portals and Ghibelline merlons might not be literal, they could be symbolic, or simply familiar and thus easy to use.

Regardless of why they were chosen, the consistency among them suggests awareness of architectural styles that were common in the region stretching from Bohemia in the east and the Alsace and eastern France in the west, and from Bavaria in the north and Lombardy and the republic of Genoa in the south. If the “rosettes” folio is a map, it might represent this region and it might not, but even if it doesn’t, the illustrator chose elements that betray a specific familiarity with the southern portion of the Holy Roman Empire.

You might notice that the picture to the right has a saddelback portal flanked by two round towers with cone-shaped roofs, similar to the first VMS castle illustrated above. It could easily be a coincidence, but for the record, the image is from a chronicle of the crusades penned in the 1460s (Bibliothèque de Genève Ms. fr. 85).

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 25 March 2020 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Family Affairs

24 March 2020

I’ve mentioned a few times that maybe the Voynich Manuscript was a family project. This seems possible because medieval fathers sometimes created books of wisdom to hand down to their sons. One medieval family codex might be of particular interest to Voynich researchers because of visual similarities to the rosettes folio.

A Book Disembodied

Detail of moth and flowers in the Cocharelli Codex.

The Cocharelli family previously of Provençe and Acre settled in Genoa and created a beautiful 14th-century codex for their children. Parts of it are based on stories told by the compiler’s grandfather. It was produced around the 1320s or 1330s, but has a murky history. At some point it was cut into pieces.

S. Nicolini (University of Bologna) reports that the cuttings appeared inside a 15th-century missal in the 19th century and were sold as part of an anonymous book collection.

Clippings have turned up in several different countries: England, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Some of the content is allegorical, being a treatise on the vices, but there are also historical events, and the folios are enlivened by naturalistic images of flora and fauna that would appeal to any age group. The drawings are surprisingly detailed considering the small size of the codex (approx. 160 x 99mm):

Moths and wasp or fly decorating the base of the folio of the Cocharelli Codex Prologue.
Naturalistic images of moths and insect embellish the base of the Prologue [BL Egerton MS 3127]

I have collected links to the fragments so they can be accessed from one place:

  • BL Additional 27695 – 15 fragments, including prologue, heaven and hell, vices of Envy, Avarice, and Gluttony, Adam and Eve, and notably the sack of Tripoli and death of Philip IV of France
  • BL Additional 28841 – exotic animals, marine life, insects, rodents, along with verse about the history of Sicily
  • BL Egerton 3127 – 4 fragments (2 leaves) of history and natural history
  • BL Egerton 3781 – 2 fragments of a courtly garden scene
  • Museum of Art Cleveland, Ms. n. 1953.152 – leaf of Accidia and her court
  • Museo del Bargello, Ms. inv. 2065 – Siege of Acre
  • Fragment sold as part of Eine Wiener Sammlung, Berlin (12 May 1930)

The illuminators are currently identified as the Master of the Cocharelli Codex (active in Genoa, c. 1330) and the Monk of Hyères (disputed). The sequence of the illustrations is considered by researchers to be different from the original order.

Multicultural Influences

Parts of the manuscript are in a more eastern style and there are several black people in African dress in the main illustrations and in the borders, as well as a person in the center of a feast who looks Asian:

Feast in Cocharelli codex ina more eastern style, Additional MS 27695

It makes you wonder if the grandfather who related these stories was a seafarer who traveled widely. There are documents that support the presence of Pellegrino Cocharelli at some of the locations mentioned in the codex (C. Concina, 2016).

One of the Egerton 3781 fragments includes this image of a garden fountain, and if you look closely, you will notice to the right, there is a building with arches and Ghibelline merlons. Genoa was well within the purview of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 14th century (the HRE included Rome and much of Burgundy/Provençe at the time):

Cocharelli Family Codex courtly scene around a garden fountain.

In this illustration on the page with text about the vice of Luxuria (lust), we see a maiden feeding a bird next to an architectural birdhouse that has Ghibelline merlons between the three towers:

Ghibelline merlons were one way in which Italians, especially those in an east/west belt where Italy spread out into the wider geographical region of Lombardy and Bohemia, signaled their allegiance to the HRE (in opposition to the pope). This political implication continued until about the mid-15th century after which the merlons gradually became more decorative than political (and thereafter spread to other areas).

In the following battle scene from BL Additional 27695, there are square battlements on all the walls and towers except for the central tower, which has swallowtail Ghibelline merlons at the top. Since this represents the sack of Tripoli (Lebanon), it seems probable that the Ghibelline merlons are symbolic rather than literal, but installations of the Knights Templar sometimes had Ghibelline merlons, so perhaps they existed to a limited extent outside of northern Italy before the late 15th century.

In the waters of this elaborate illumination, there are four galleys from Genoa, in addition to others from Pisa and the Veneto:

In the 13th and 14th centuries, there were considerable tensions between the papacy and various kings and emperors in the late Middle Ages. Philip IV of France (1268–1314) aggressively challenged the power of the pope and the increasingly powerful Knights Templar. He gave important positions to his family members and even attempted to install a relative as Holy Roman Emperor to enlarge the kingdom of France.

The Cocharelli family recorded the arrest and torture of the Templars by Philip IV for a variety of charges, such as heresy, black magic, and financial corruption. In 1310 and 1314, King Philip had many of them burned at the stake. But his dreams of a large consolidated empire withered a few months later when he suffered a stroke while hunting in northern France. He died soon after.

Swallowtail Merlons in the Voynich Manuscript

In the Cocharelli illustration below, the roundup of the Templars is shown in the top half of the folio. The walled city has Ghibelline merlons on the front of the complex, but not the back. This is similar to the small drawing of a walled city or castle in the upper right section of the VMS rosettes folio.

The walled garden at the bottom of the Cocharelli folio, depicting game animals and the death of Philip IV, is completely surrounded by a long wall with Ghibelline merlons. In the VMS, there is also a long wall on one of the sections connecting two rosettes, but I wouldn’t describe this as a garden wall, it looks more like a long city or castle wall:

Since the events surrounding King Pillip in the Cocharelli codex took place in France, it is not likely that the merlons in these illustrations are literal, but since Philip IV was ardently against the power of the papacy and open to allegiances with the HRE, and the illustrators were Italian, it may have been their way of diagraming his political leanings:

Execution of the Templars and Death of Philip IV of France
Storybook style illustration recording the rounding up and persecution of the Knights Templar by Philip IV of France at the top, and the subsequent death of King Philip from a stroke while he was hunting in northern France. [Source: BL Additional MS 27695 folio 6v]
Detail of the walled city and roundup of the Knights Templar. Note the Ghibelline merlons are mostly at the front.
Closeup of the walled garden stocked with game, representing the death of Philip IV from a stroke that occurred during a hunt in northern France in 1314 not long after he had dispensed with the Templars.

The VMS is also known for its elaborate containers in the small-plants section and the container-like “towers” on the rosettes folio. There are also some interesting containers on Cocharelli folio f7v in a fragment that has been completely cut away from the text:

In contrast, the illustration of the Siege of Acre (Museo del Bargello), in which the Crusaders lost Acre, a city on the Levantine coast, Ghibelline merlons are not included except on a single portal in the lower center part of the city:

(Note, there is some dispute about this being Acre. Some scholars say Genoa, but the textual evidence seems to lean toward Acre.)

In a discussion of the possible ordering of the original Cocharelli codex folios, Concina mentions some of the political turmoil associated with the Guelfs and the Ghibellines:

In the summer of 1308 Opizzino Spinola of Lucoli proclaimed himself the only captain of Genoa by deposing and imprisoning Bernabò Doria, who was his co-ruler in the traditional diarchy established for the government of the city. Following this coup d’état, many leaders of the Ghibelline families of the Doria (including Corrado and his son Pietro) and Spinola of San Luca, as well as of the Guelf families of the Grimaldi and Fieschi, were forced to flee the city. In June 1309 those families exiled set aside their old differences and joined forces to defeat Opizzino and his army at Sestri Ponente, forcing him to take shelter in the castle of Gavi. On the same day, the Guelf and Ghibelline exiles entered Genoa, apparently without great losses….

In addition, if we consider historical references, we can glimpse a family [the Cocharellis] gravitating towards the Ghibelline party, the Doria and the Aragoneses.

—Chiara Concina (University of Verona)

Summary

As mentioned previously, the Ghibelline merlons in these drawings may be symbolic rather than literal. It’s hard to find evidence of this style of merlon outside of northern Italy/Lombardy/Bohemia before the latter 15th century and the Cocharelli drawings are from the 14th century when their geographical distribution was quite limited. But, considering that Philip IV of France was one of the more ardent opponents of the pope and friendlier than some French monarchs to the Holy Roman Empire (he was hoping to expand into that region as well, via family alliances), the Ghibelline merlon reflects his political leanings via a symbol that was familiar to Italian artists.

Here is a drawing of Padua, with a long wall and numerous towers topped by Ghibelline merlons, by Felice Celeste Zanchi c. 1300:

Padua with Ghibelline merlons, c. 1300 by Felice Zanchi.

But are they real or symbolic? A 15th century drawing of Padua shows square merlons, so perhaps Zanchi added some from his imagination.

At times there is only a glimpse of the merlons, as in this illustration in BNF Latin 9333 (c. 1410s):

Sometimes the merlons are more clearly indicated, as in this earlier example of Tacuinum Sanitatis (Casanatense, 14th century):

So what about the merlons in the VMS rosettes folio. Are they literal or symbolic?

It is interesting that the walled city or castle at the top of the VMS folio was drawn with more Ghibelline merlons on the front than there on the back (similar to the Cocharelli depiction).

Is this how compounds were usually built? Or do the drawings in the two different codices have a common inspiration? Is the VMS merlon sending a political message? Is it a reference to a specific event? Or is it an actual place, a landmark to help a traveler find his way?

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright March 2020 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Torre Filosofica

6 February 2020

There are frequent comments that folio 77r represents medieval elements in the cosmological sense, but as you can see from my recent blog, I’m somewhat skeptical. There are five openings and two of the outflows are almost the same. Plus, they could be phlegm/bile/blood or various kinds of weather (hail, wind, rain, snow). But, even those ideas didn’t completely satisfy me, so I kept trying to think of others and here is an additional possibility….

A Different Interpretation

I’ve blogged about VMS folio 77r a few times and if you read the more recent ones, you may have noticed that I have never been completely convinced that these pipes were meant to be earth, water, air, and fire. Maybe they represent various outflows of alchemical heating and condensing processes:

Voynich Manuscript volio 77r "elements" pipes related to alchemical furnaces

In other words, instead of earth, water, air, and fire (except in the metaphorical sense in which most alchemical processes were expressed at the time), this might be heat, exhaust, and either two instances of condensation, or possibly one instance of boiling and the other of condensation, since two of the VMS outflows are very similar but not exactly the same.

Many alchemical images have been related to the VMS in one way or another over the decades. Not surprisingly, since many alchemical manuscripts are enigmatic and highly symbolic.

I’ve blogged a few distillation images myself, and the two big bladder-like things have always reminded me of distillation vessels, but I couldn’t decide exactly what they might be. It was bi3mw’s post #70 on the Alchemical Symbolism thread that motivated me to go back through my notes and think about it again. Now I think these bladders might represent the sublimation process:

Similarly, the bladder-like shapes at the top of f77v have always reminded me of the she-wolf’s teats in the story of Romulus and Remus, or the chest-of-plenty on Diana of Ephesus (which I have posted in the past), but now I think there might be another explanation:

Maybe the row of teats is a row of distillation vessels and the rounded forms left and right are heating vats.

Various alchemical vessels that have shapes similar to the VMS. The one on the bottom right is similar to another snaky distillation apparatus pointed out by bi3mw on the Voynich.ninja forum.

The pipes that connect them are spiritually guided by nymphs (all of alchemy was considered to be under spiritual guidance, hence the heavy use of religious motifs in alchemical drawings). Both magic and alchemy were suspect professions, associated with black arts, so the more religious symbology that was used, the more it legitimized these occupations.

The VMS Rosettes Folio Reprised

On a subject some researchers might not believe is related to distillation processes, I’ve also blogged numerous interpretations for the VMS “map” and I’ve only written up about 20% of the ideas I’ve been working on for years. One that has been lying on the backburner is that the central rosette might be the Tower of Philosophy, related to medieval alchemy. I haven’t posted it mainly because I wasn’t sure, but putting together the distillation process represented by the 77r pipes AND some of the features of the rosettes folio, I feel more confident about this idea than I did before.

I don’t know if anyone has specifically related the central rosette on the VMS “map” folio to the alchemical furnaces of the Tower of Philosophy. Most of the time people mention locations in the middle east (especially Baghdad) or north Africa and some people consider the folio to be a form of portolan.

To me, the central rosette always looked like a sacred place (probably because of the stars and arches and the central position), but I did not specifically associate it with the sacred mountain of the alchemists until today because many places were considered sacred in the middle ages. I think it might represent both sacred mountain and the alchemists’ furnace combined into one drawing. As I have mentioned in previous blogs… the meeting place between terrestrial and cosmological realms.

Here are two examples side-by-side so you can see the similarities. Note that the tower is round, with arches, like the arches in the center of the VMS rosette with the container-like towers. It has an almost onion-dome top and at the base of the image, there are more “towers” that look like pipes:

Left: Donato d’Eremita di Rocca alchemical furnace/tower of philosophy, Naples 1624 with many structural forms similar to central rosette on “map” folio of Voynich Manuscript, Beinecke 408, Yale.

Here is a link to an earlier (15th-century) image of an alchemy furnace with tower-like parts:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-alchemy-furnace-miniature-from-alchemical-discourse-news-photo/142084494

Robert Fludd’s images are often posted on the Voynich.ninja forum due to their structural and textural similarities to some of the VMS drawings. They are more sophisticated, and they were created much later than the VMS, but it’s my belief that his ideas were not entirely original, that they derive from older models and thus might have some relevance.

Here is an example that is similar in shape and direction to the general outlay of the rosettes folio. It represents a cosmic battle with demons and archangels attacking and defending the alchemist in the center. Notice the “spewy” things, all drawn in similar ways, but each taking a slightly different form (think of hordes of locusts or bees or frogs as are often mentioned in biblical literature):

Archaengels fighting off demons and plagues, with the alchemist in the center. Robert Fludd.

I’ve blogged at length about the “spewy” things in the rosettes folder, never quite knowing what they were, but only that they looked like connections between the inner and outer circles. Maybe, as in Fludd’s engraving, they are pestilences, or a metaphorical reference to the battle between good and evil (with archangels and demons taking sides).

In this Rosicrucian image with alchemical references, notice the tent at the top of the sacred hill (sacred hills are a holdover from Paganism) and the alchemists’ cave below it. The VMS rosettes folio is full of these kinds of structures, almost too many to list in one blog, and MarcoP pointed out that Ellie Velinska had suggested tents for some of the shapes on the rosettes folio. When I took another look, I realized some of the small details that originally made no sense to me might be interpreted as tent flaps. Here is an image of a sacred hill atop an alchemists’ cave (such underground laboratories did actually exist, one was unearthed under a chapel complete with shards of numerous vessels):

Alchemical symbolism, tent on sacred mountain, secret societies.
Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum, thought to be by Daniel Mögling

The Many Plant Folios

Distillation has a direct relationship to plants and plants like Centaurea (which I think is depicted fairly accurately on folio 2r) were of specific interest to distillers of alcoholic products, both recreational and medicinal. Tinctures of alcohol not only helped preserve the plants, but they provided concentrated formulas that were sometimes more effective than herbal “simples” (basic plant parts that had not been processed by distillation).

Jakob de Tepenecz, one of the probable owners of the VMS, became quite wealthy from sales of his distilled products. So much so, he could afford to lend money to the emperor himself.

I don’t know if the various sections of the VMS are like separate booklets that have been bound together, or if they were meant to relate to each other, but IF there’s an over-riding theme, then plants would fit right in.

Astrology

Alchemy has also been related to astrology and kabbalah. Besides the three “teats” (see f77v), this hybrid creature has a star on its crown rather than the usual Christian cross. There are also stars-on-sticks radiating from the center. The image further includes references to celestial beings and signs of the zodiac:

A combination of alchemical, kabbalistic, spiritual, and astrological symbols. Note the three “teats” teats and the star at the top of the crown that are reminiscent of VMS imagery. [Source: Michelspacher, 1615]

Notice also, in the above image, the inverted T-in-O, a cosmological variant of the T-in-O that is so common in map-related writings.

So maybe the VMS is alchemical after all. After investigating it for a while, I was leaning away from this idea, but a few things clicked when bi3mw revived the ninja thread, so I decided to take another look.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright Feb. 2020 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Into the Cavern

12 August 2019

This is yet another idea I had for the VMS “map”. It may not be the best one, I’m still partial to a couple I’ve posted before, but Christian themes are getting attention at the moment, so I decided to add it because it is based on a different interpretation for the flame-like shapes inside the VMS mountain.

Most of the time I think of the wavy lines inside the VMS “crater” as flames or water but it has also occurred to me that they might be teeth or celestial waves. For example, in this nativity scene, rather than a halo, there are wavy rays in a rough mandorla shape emanating from the Christ child:

Nativity scene with Christ child.
Wavy emanations instead of a halo [Arsenal MS 1175 c. 1510]

If the wavy lines in the shape that looks like a mountain on the VMS “map” are celestial rays, rather than fire or water, then there’s another location that might fit the “map”…

So let’s assume for the duration of this blog that the toothlike curves indicate some special status.

The lines in the VMS crater don’t aim outward, they aim toward the center, so perhaps the mountain itself is a sacred place (or a hollow within it). In this nativity relief carving, the archway rays point inward, so the direction of the rays is context dependent.

Many mountains were considered sacred in Pagan times and the transition from Paganism to Christianity occurred gradually, so there are Christian shrines built into hillsides, and numerous nativity scenes drawn within the framework of a mountain:

Pietro Cavallini nativity mosaic
Christian nativity scene framed within a grotto-like mountain setting.
Mosaic by Pietro Cavallini, Rome, 1296 [Courtesy of Wikioo.org]

The Cavallini mosiac is modeled in the same general form as an even earlier work, also from Italy, that includes the mountain frame plus a baptismal bath (these elements were also copied into Greek and Russian works of the 15th century):

Nativity mosaic with mountain framework (possibly a hold-over from Pagan beliefs) and baptismal bath, Capella Palatina, Palermo, c. 1150 [Courtesy of The Yorck Project, Wikimedia]

The Sacred Grotto

In this image, there is a windy road leading to a crater-like mountain. At the top of another hill are Mary and child resting in a garden-like setting with many plants, birds, and a deer (in another version of this painting, Patinier paints the garden like a small farm):

Flight from Egypt painting by Joachim Patinier
Flight to Egypt by Joachim Patinier, c. 1510 [Jean Louis Mazieres, CC 2.0, Wikipedia]

To the left and right are water, little roads and bridges (the city in the distance might be Marseille). Near the taller mountain are a couple of smaller ones, with traces of castles at the top.

Here is another version of the Sainte-Baume mountain by the same artist. Note the windy road, and the celestial spirit hovering over the edifice. This may represent ascension, or Mary elevated daily by angels:

Detail of painting of Sainte-Baume by Joachim Patinier illustrating the sacred grotto.

In other words, in thematic content, the paintings of Sainte-Baume have many features in common with the VMS “map”. Here is a snippet of the portion that resembles a mountain connected to a windy path:

Voynich Manuscript windy path

Patinier has chosen to show the village as domes, towers, and connections to nearby hillocks with small bridges. Could this be the same location represented by the VMS central rotum?

This particular series of paintings is based on a location in Provençe, the sacred grotto of Ste. Baume, which is still active as a pilgrimage site. Could the garden-like rotum on the bottom-right be the resting place of Mary on her journey?

Ghibelline merlons, as are found on the lower part of the VMS “map” were generally associated with Lombardy/Northern Italy, but they apparently also extended a short way into Provençe in the Middle Ages. I don’t know, however, if there were any in Marseille, which had its roots as a Greek colony.

Mary’s Journey

Stories vary, but one of the stories is that Mary of Magdalene fled persecution in a small boat and landed on the shores of Marseille. From there she traveled to the mountain of Ste. Baume where she took refuge in the grotto and made it her home.

Please note, there is considerable confusion over the different Marys in the Bible. Some say Mary Magdalene was the mother of Jesus. Others say Mary the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Egypt were all different people, and still others clearly describe “Mary the Magdalene of Egypt” as one person, but separate from Mary the mother of Jesus (I have seen “Mary the Magdalene of Egypt” written as though Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt were the same person in 15th-century manuscripts).

Plus, Mary Magdalene of the Gospels and Mary, the sister of Martha (who is said to have fled with Martha), may have been different people but were also sometimes considered the same.

Some of these divergent viewpoints are based on copying errors, but there were also differing opinions on how to interpret biblical passages, and different accounts by supposed historians. So keep in mind that sometimes the same person is illustrated standing next to herself, comic-book style, to indicate two different periods in her life, and other times they are two different Marys.

For the purpose of this blog, I will be referring to Mary of Magdalene who is said to have washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and a jar of ointment, the Mary who witnessed the resurrection and subsequently fled (with her supposed sister Martha), not the Mary who was Jesus’s mother (or the numerous other Marys in the Bible). I also mention Mary of Egypt who is often confused with Mary Magdalene. Be aware that the Mary who washed Jesus’s feet may not have been Mary Magdalene, even though many people in medieval times believed she was.

Now back to the sacred grotto…

Here is a postcard commemorating Ste. Baume, with Mary at the top, with three of her attributes, a skull, crucifix, and a chalice. She is flanked by two angels on puffs of clouds, with the Ste. Baume mountain and grotto buildings below. It gives us a hint of how the pilgrimage site may have looked in the 19th century:

Sometimes Mary’s chalice is quite ornate (as in carvings in the region of Champeaux), similar to some of the domed containers in the VMS small-plants section. In other images, it is quite simple. If you go to this link, you will see a great variety of containers held in Mary’s hand.

Hairy Mary in the wilderness with her three loaves.

Her hairstyles vary, as well, depending on when the image was created (and by whom), but I thought readers might like to see this version of the hair and chalice (there are numerous nymphs with braids in the VMS), and this image on the right, with Mary in the wilderness completely enveloped by her hair. Both Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt are said to have wandered in the wilderness, and both are often shown with very long hair.

In fact, there are even more Marys. In this image, we have three Marys and their husbands: 1) Mary (wife of Joseph) , 2) Mary (wife or daughter of Clopas), and 3) Mary Salome (mother of John, the Evangelist):

Three Marys with their husbands.
Mary, Mary, and Mary (different ones this time) with their respective husbands [courtesy of British Library Royal MS 2 B VII, c. 1310s]

But, confusingly, there is a fourth Mary in this illumination… Mary the Virgin is pictured separately above Mary and Joseph (almost as though they are different people), with the dove (Holy Spirit?) between her and a man with a halo (one who is drawn differently from Joseph):

Virgin Mary and the dove and nimbed male

It’s easy to say, “Oh well, it’s just another point in time, when Mary became pregnant with Jesus” before she and Joseph started doing the hootchy kootchy, but you can’t just assume these things, you have to read the text and study the imagery in context with the other Mary stories.

In other words, there were numerous Marys, and some perceived them as different people, others as the same. Even if they agreed that it was Mary the Magdalene who fled to Provençe and she was different from Mary of Egypt, there were still different narratives about where Mary Magdalene actually went and what happened to her once she got there.

How This Relates to the VMS

Unfortunately, if there is Christian imagery under the surface of the Voynich Manuscript, and if any of it relates to Mary, the profusion of stories about her whereabouts and her physical characteristics (as seen through medieval eyes) will make it harder to match up VMS imagery with any specific account. Plus, there are several VMS nymphs with very long hair.

In this image, Mary Magdalene is shown with a chalice and Mary of Egypt with very long hair:

Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt enveloped in hair, St. Margaret, and Martyr [The Queen Mary Psalter, courtesy of British Library, Royal MS 2 B VII]

It’s possible that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt are confused because both were described as sinful women who were cleansed of their sins.

Here Mary (this should be Mary of Egypt) has long hair and a hair coat:

Zosimas giving hairy Mary of Egypt his cloak. A year later, he is said to have later found her dead in the wilderness [courtesy of British Library Yates Thompson MS 3].

The hair-suit is an iconic way of indicating someone who is living wild, separate from civilization. Not every illustrator covered Mary in hair. Some of the Greek manuscripts show Mary naked.

In this illustration, the idea of the hair suit relating to wilderness is made stronger by surrounding Mary with monkeys:

Hairy Mary of Egypt with monkeys [Courtesy of BL Royal MS 10 E IV]

Relating Mary to the VMS “Map” Folio

Keeping in mind that there are many Marys and sometimes their stories overlap, let’s focus on the boat story of Mary Magdalene, the Mary who is most often credited with witnessing the resurrection, and fleeing with her siblings to a distant shore.

The following image combines many elements of the flight of Mary. She traveled by boat to Marseilles, where she continued on foot through forests and farms and moved into the mountain of Ste. Baume. In this instance, she’s not wearing a wilderness style “hair suit”. Instead, she is covered in her own long hair during her daily ride with angels:

Sforza Hours, Mary Magdalen and her flight to St. Baume.
Mary Magdalen with long hair, lifted by angel. Below is the boat in which she fled, and the Ste. Baume mountain grotto in which she lived before wandering in the wilderness. [courtesy of the British Library, Add MS 34294]

Here is a less elaborate drawing from the early 14th century. Mary (of Egypt) is holding the three loaves of bread she took into the wilderness, and nearby is a boat:

Mary in the Wilderness with three loaves of bread. Boat nearby.
Mary with three loaves approaching her get-away boat [BL Royal MS 10 E IV]

The story continues with Mary’s hair growing very long to convey her lengthy stay in the wilderness. The three loaves are nearby to make it clear that this is Mary (if you didn’t know the story behind it, you might mistake them for stones or tablets):

Mary with long hair in the wilderness, three loaves serve as attributes.

Mary is shown beneath a tree, among the birds and boars (this garden-and-animals theme occurs in numerous Mary illustrations):

Mary among the animals in the wilderness.

After several decades, Mary is so engulfed in hair, she is almost unrecognizable:

Mary engulfed in hair after 30 years in the wilderness

Mary’s time is almost up, she meets a passing saint and she dies in the wilderness one or three years later. In some accounts, she receives last communion back at her cave and in still others, she receives last communion at the river Jordan:

The following example, from the Life of Mary, focuses on Zosimus giving Mary of Egypt a cloak, as she looks out through the crags of her grotto. Even though the cloak is usually associated with Mary of Egypt, the fresco is in the Magdalene Chapel in Assisi:

Zosimus gives Mary a cloak, San Francesco, Assisi
Magdalene Chapel, San Francesco, Assisi, c. 1320s. The image is no doubt the result of confusion between Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. [Giotto di Bondone, Wikipedia]

When I was pondering the figure at the top of folio 76v, I wondered whether this long-haired lady with the plant might represent Mary in her holy grotto (the shape of the arch-like texture is somewhat like an altar). Mary is shown with a halo and a stalk of grain in a Lombardic manuscript by the Master of Monza. Mary of Egypt was usually shown with three loaves, but sometimes with a sheaf of grain.

The VMS nymph is a bit thin and disheveled compared to many of the other nymphs. Could this be wilderness Mary?

According to one version, Mary asked Zosimus (also called Maximin) to meet her on the banks of the Jordan River so that he could grant her Holy Communion. In the lower part of this folio, a long-haired nymph appears to be stepping into water and swimming. Could this be the River Jordan?

I’m not sure what to make of the second nymph, the one holding a red-striped and dotted “thing”. The “thing” looks vaguely like a loaded spindle (very vaguely), but could it be a cross between a spindle and a rolled-up cloak (with thread being the unifying idea)? I’m not confident about the ID of the strange red object, and the nymph holding it doesn’t have long hair, so I’m not sure how it ties in with the drawings around it (assuming there is a connection), so I’ll ruminate a while longer.

The figure in the top right of the folio is ambiguous, possibly male, and may relate to what is happening on the facing folio (unbound) rather than what is on this folio, but if it is male, maybe it’s Zosimus. His crypt is said to have sheltered the tomb of Mary Magdalene in Provençe (which again is a bit of a stretch since Mary of Egypt was born quite some time after Mary Magdalene).

Links Between the Iconography of Mary and the Passion of Christ

I have something of particular interest for those who have been following recent developments in Voynich research…

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, there is an embroidery of Mary Magdalene surrounded by her attributes (ointment chalice, crucifix, skull, buildings in the distance) and yet the border includes implements from the Arma Christi. The two kinds of imagery are not usually combined, and when they are, Jesus is usually the focal figure. In this one, Mary dominates the frame and Jesus is not present.

The embroidery is not medieval—it is from the 17th century and I can only post a thumbnail, but you can click here for the Victoria & Albert Museum to see it full-sized. Note that there are 16 coins (it doesn’t have to be 30 as long as the meaning is clear). There is no helical rope around the flagellation pole, but it immediately made me wonder, is there an earlier image of Mary Magdalene together with Arma Christi implements that inspired this one? Could this combination of themes be relevant to the VMS?

Are there Arma Christi narratives encoded in the plants as discussed in the previous blog, with the story of Mary Magdalen included elsewhere?

Another Look at the VMS “Map” Folio

So coming back to the “map” folio, is it possible to relate some of the features to Mary’s journey?

Ste. Baume is a very hilly area, with a rippled geology that would be difficult to tread on foot, so the paths are mostly to the side of the many peaks and valleys shown in this aerial photo. These corrugated hills are reminiscent of the VMS escarpments. When traveling on foot, one would see their regular rise and fall and possibly some of the bands of color:

The corrugated hills of Sainte-Baume in shades of dark and light materials.
[Aerial photo courtesy of Adrian Tync, Wikimedia].
Voynich Manuscript escarpments
There are textured escarpments along the pathway on the VMS “map” folio that connect to a feature that looks like a mountain. Could they be the corrugated hills of Ste. Baume?

The inner grotto, where Mary lived before venturing into the wilderness, has a modern shrine, which was probably much simpler in the Middle Ages:

Shrine to Mary in the grotto of Sainte-Baume.
Shrine to Mary in the grotto of Sainte-Baume [courtesy of M. Disdero, Wikipedia]

Provençe is also home to bathing pools and waterfalls, a theme that occurs in numerous VMS folios:

Waterfall and pool in Provençe.

Provençe is known for some of its round towers (in contrast to the more common square ones). The VMS tower-in-the-hole is also round, which might have have been inspired by architecture in Lombardy, Pisa, or Provençe.

Going back to my early idea about Jerusalem, the Mary Magdalene church, built on the Mount of Olives, looks somewhat like the onion-dome towers in the VMS central rotum, but it was built in the 19th century and the previous building was a single tower with a less rounded dome:

Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem
Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem [public domain]
The Mount of Olives in the early 18th century, engraving by Calmet [public domain]

I’m inclined to believe that the “towers” in the central VMS rotum are a combination of containers (possibly spice containers) and architectural towers, rather than a drawing of an actual building. They might represent towers in the metaphorical sense, or even a specific building in a vague kind of way, but I doubt if it’s meant to be taken literally—towers don’t usually have feet.

Summary

So is it possible the VMS “map” represents Mary’s journey or landmarks to the pilgrimage site?

This is pretty speculative, but I still think the VMS “map” might be drawn on two levels—a corporeal level and a spiritual level. I’ve ghosted out the spiritual level for this example.

Now assuming the four corners are more literal than the others, perhaps the bottom right (which I thought years ago might be the garden of Gethsemane) is the farm-like landscape shown in Mary’s journeys. The top-right, with the “big water” might be the port of Marseille, where Mary’s battered boat came ashore. The top-left seems like a reasonable guess for the mountain grotto where she lived for a time, and the bottom-left might be the various arms of the Durance river:

This is what Marseille looked like in the 16th century. Note the rows of windmills—the patterns in the 2nd and 8th rota on the VMS “map” have always reminded me of fountains, water wheels, and windmills:

Colorized map of Marseille, 1575
Detail of colorized version of 1575 map of Marseille published in Cologne. Note the castles on the various hilltops, and the gardens and farms nearby. There is also a square bastion on one of the islands, and a semicircular breakwater.
Marseille (Massilia) in the 15th century.
Marseille (Massilia) from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, with numerous portals for the Marseille canals. The image is not necessarily accurate but gives a feeling for the time.

On modern roads, it is about an hour’s drive from Marseille to Sainte-Baume. In medieval times, it was probably three weeks journey by foot.

There are numerous possibilities for the VMS map… Jerusalem, a predecessor to Villa d’Este, Naples/Baia/Salerno, Tuscany, Venice, Rhodes, and numerous others, but I thought I would add a biblical journey so there’s at least one mythical map on the list.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Back to the Drawing Board

8 August 2019

Back in July 2016 I posted a short blog about some of my early ideas for the VMS “map”. My favorites in the early years were Jerusalem (this was actually my first idea); Villa d’Este; the Naples/Sicily volcanic area; the natural-spa areas in northern Italy/Germany/Czech; and one I haven’t disclosed yet because I want to write it up properly with pictures and I haven’t had time to do a proper job.

There are others, but these are the ones I particularly liked and spent considerable time investigating.

1) Jerusalem

I spent countless hours studying old paintings, engravings, postcards, and aerial photographs of Jerusalem. My reasons were simple:

  • The top-left rotum in the VMS “map” is oval (olive-shaped) and looks like a mountain (I thought it might be the Mount of Olives),
  • the center rotum has lots of towers (the traditional position and way to depict Jerusalem),
  • there was a tradition of building tombs into the hills next to paths, which means that some of these old tombs look like towers in holes (you have to look at very old images to see this because all the paths have been widened since medieval times and they look less like they are in holes), and
  • pilgrimages to Jerusalem were customary and thus a journal-style “map” with landmarks would be appropriate to the time.

After studying Jerusalem so extensively that I could walk around it in my head, I was beginning to think I might be wrong or at least that I should not get too invested in one idea, and that I should take some time to investigate other ideas.

One of the next items on my list was Villa d’Este, which is an astonishing piece of medieval/renaissance hydraulic engineering, partly inspired by old Roman ruins and earlier water gardens that were not quite so elaborate. The engineering was so advanced that sensors would detect the presence of visitors and turn on the sprinklers to give them an unexpected shower.

2) Villa d’Este

Even though I was worried that the construction of Villa d’Este was too late to have inspired the VMS (even back in 2008 I pegged the VMS in my mind as 14th or 15th century, mainly for palaeological reasons), I thought if I learned everything I could about it, maybe I could discover an earlier water garden with the same properties that might be connected to the VMS. Here is what intrigued me about Villa d’Este:

  • It is overtly Pagan, filled with pools, fountains, and statues of nymphs, echoing the profusion of nymphs and water in the VMS. Remarkably, it was built by a Christian cardinal who showed no remorse whatsoever when his colleagues criticized him for his choice of Pagan themes.
  • There is a spiral staircase in the main structure (and a spiral on the VMS “map”).
  • It has many topological features in common with the “map” folio and VMS pool folios, including waterfalls, fountains, natural pools used for swimming, a winding path leading to the estate with an ancient round Pagan temple, and many other features that seem to match the VMS drawings.
  • There is an extensive herb/kitchen garden and surrounding gardens, which might have been documented at some point in time.

In other words, some connection with the Villa d’Este or its predecessors could explain numerous features on the VMS “map” and also the many pool drawings and nymphs in other parts of the manuscript, and possibly even the plant folios. You can almost chart a path around the estate lands and match them up with the landmarks on the VMS “map” folio.

I also spent time investigating the d’Este family tree to see if water gardens existed in the earlier generations of the family.

I became so familiar with Villa d’Este from photos, postcards, paintings, Google Earth and aerial photos, that I could walk around this in my head, as well, and I was reluctant to let go of the idea except that I had another one that seemed equally intriguing…

3) Naples/Baia/Sicily/Salerno Volcanic Region

This is one of my favorites. I’ve blogged about it several times. After becoming so familiar with Villa d’Este that I felt I had been there, I dove into a more in-depth study of the Naples/Salerno/Baia region. It caught my attention for the following reasons:

  • Vesuvius has an eye-shaped crater (similar to the “mountain” top-left on the VMS map). The wavy lines in the eye-shape might be flames, thus indicating a volcano, or they might be water filling in a dormant crater, or they could represent the famous Sulphurata/Solfatara, Campi Flegrei, all of which are present in the Naples region.
  • Medieval medical students from areas like Paris and Heidelberg frequently spent part of their university career in Naples or Salerno studying plant medicine and astrology, and might document the journey as a map.
  • The baths of Pozzuoli were located here (until they were destroyed by an eruption in 1538) and might account for the bathing nymphs in other parts of the VMS.

I have been to Naples. Unfortunately, it was an ill-fated trip. On the day I arrived, the museum staff went on strike and judging by events later in the day, it was not likely to end that day or any day soon.

There are numerous other commonalities with Naples that I’ve already covered and I won’t repeat here because the direction of this blog is related to more recent events. But before getting to that, there is one more location that I studied before moving on to other subjects…

4) Rome

I thought the way the VMS rota were organized, in separate circles connected by pathways, might be inspired by the hills of Rome. Rome is sometimes in the center of mappae mundi, rather than Jerusalem, and we have the saying, “All roads lead to Rome”, so I thought it might be possible to relate the VMS map to this area.

After some effort, I couldn’t get the topological features to fit as well as they did to Villa d’Este or Naples/Baia, but it seemed worthy of consideration. I tried the same with Paris, Venice, Genoa, the Flanders coast, and the Po estuary, with mixed results. They didn’t fit as well as Naples.

5) Natural Spas

In Greece, Italy, Croatia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and numerous other places, there are natural spas with thermal pools, waterfalls, green pools, blue pools, grottoes and numerous features in common with the VMS.

I was overwhelmed.

I discovered there might be hundreds or thousands of areas that could match the VMS map if it documented a natural-spa area. This was bewildering, and very difficult to investigate because the topology of natural spas in the Middle Ages is not well documented. Plus, many of them have been over-built with modern spas and the original geology altered.

I gave up. The task was too difficult, so I confined my studies to a few of the ones that were popular retreats for medieval nobility, one of those being Tuscany (described in a previous blog due to the marble escarpments that look similar to features in the VMS “map”). I haven’t had time to write up the others.

I’m not going to describe #6 yet because it deserves a blog of its own and I don’t want to disclose the location until I can do a good job of it.

On to the point of this blog…

Recently, I’ve had to re-evaluate my assumptions about the VMS. The process of re-organizing my thoughts started more than three years ago, but it took a long time for the mounting evidence to convince me I might be wrong about the “non-Christian” nature of the VMS…

The Impetus of the Mystery Critter

In March 2016, I was inspired by comments by René Zandbergen and K. Gheuens to consider that the critter on f79v might be a golden fleece. The curved posture was the key feature provoking my interest. The blog is here.

Castoreum beaver hunt

Then in April 2016, when I was writing about Theriac, I thought, what other possibilities are there?

Perhaps the head-down posture and “scales” of the mystery critter might be a reference to the castoreum beaver, an animal that shows up regularly in medieval herbal manuscripts and which is often drawn very badly (it usually looks more like a dog, a deer, or a platypus than a beaver, and is frequently drawn with a scaly tail). Here is a link to that blog.

In other words, I was trying to think of as many explanations as possible and then hoped to find other elements on the folio confirming one of the guesses.

Jason and the golden fleece

So what did we have? Armadillo, Pangolin, Sheep, Fleece, Beaver, etc., and somewhere along the line I also suggested an aardvark (no one seemed to like that idea but I’ll keep it on the list because they confused pangolins and aardvarks in the Middle Ages due to their similar habits and habitats).

Then I went through medieval imagery for each animal, one-by-one, trying to figure out how each one was traditionally drawn and why, and collected as many examples as I could find.

By 2018, I had more than 2,000 medieval images of sheep. That might seem like a good starting point, but the ones that related best to the VMS were the ones I had been reluctant to collect.

Baaaaaaaa…d

The irony (which will become clear further down) is that I didn’t collect most of the Christian-themed sheep I came across, even though they were in the majority, because I didn’t think the VMS was a Christian-themed manuscript. About 70% of my samples were from secular or zodiac sources (some of which are only incidental embellishments in Christian manuscripts and were not directly illustrating Bible stories).

Then came the eye-opener, which hit me sometime in late 2018, and which I blogged about in April 2019 (the “zoomer” post I lost and had to repost) and another in June 2019… the imagery surrounding the mystery critter (cloudband “cushion”, lines, etc.). Like it or not, the critter’s milieu was more similar to Christian imagery than the others.

This took me by surprise. I thought, “Could I have been wrong all this time? A dozen years of studying this manuscript and I’ve been discounting the possibility of Christian content.”

Of course then I kicked myself because I TRY to search with as few assumptions as possible.

So where is this leading?

It’s leading to interpretation. But first, let’s get short-sightedness out of the way first…

Many images get posted on the Voynich.ninja forum. Much of it is not new to me. I have more than a 300,000 plant images catalogued and accessible at the touch of a finger (I was interested in plants before I learned about the VMS). I also have more than 20,000 medieval plant images, many of which I can now recognize and identify on sight. I have related these to images of real plants so I can automatically display them side-by-side sorted by date and illustrative tradition. Here, for example, is a very small portion of the information I have for Agrimonia:

Medieval botanical timeline and traditions

I have more than 550 complete zodiac series (almost 7,000 images) and thousands upon thousands of medieval and ancient animal images (dragons, sheep, bulls, snakes, fish, etc.), thousands of pictures of medieval maps, merlons, towers, castles, and escarpments. I’m not even going to try to count them but I had to buy another several-terabytes drive to accommodate the overflow.

Despite this penchant for collecting, I am fairly selective and realize now that I zoomed past a lot of Christian imagery because I didn’t think it was relevant.

The Sea Change

So what changed my mind?

It wasn’t any one thing, it was a pattern that was emerging…

For example, I took a good hard look at The Desert of Religion (Add ms 37049), the Carthusian manuscript described in a previous blog.

I mentioned Add ms 37049‘s humble drawing style (similar to the VMS) on the forum in February 2018, but I didn’t read it until a few months later. That’s when I realized the picture of Jerusalem had been extracted from the preceding mappa mundi rather than being included or repeated as a separate drawing. That is not common.

And that was an “Aha!” moment.

I thought to myself, “Is this the way the VMS is created? Have they taken things that usually go together and split them into separate chunks? Is this why the VMS is so hard to understand?”

Looking for Confirmation… Could it Be True?

As soon as that thought crossed my mind I went to the cosmological section and looked for a Creation theme and this section (of which I enclose a portion) seems like a possible candidate. Many people try to identify this as individual stars or constellations, but I think it might be more metaphysical than physical:

But I wasn’t sure I could precisely pin it down without more study, so early in 2019, I tried another folio. I re-evaluated f86v and realized, after a few days, that the drawing wasn’t so strange after all….

The VMS is drawn very differently from traditional manuscripts, but the themes of things falling out of the sky, birds, double tors (possibly representing the pillars of the sky), earthquakes, people hiding, and the world erupting into chaotic movement were common in biblical stories and apocalypse manuscripts, and I was able to find them in classical literature also, so I posted this blog in March 2019 with a sampling of possible interpretations, including one from the Book of Revelation.

I didn’t want to get locked into one idea, which is why I posted four ideas, but the one from Revelation matched quite well. That’s when I really started wondering if I had been wrong about the VMS. Maybe there was Christian imagery, after all. Maybe. (I was still reluctant to believe it.)

But whether I believed it or not, I have to admit, it changed the way I collected imagery from that point on, and it goosed me into trying harder to determine if the mystery critter might be a lamb rather than a pangolin or beaver.

The Best is Yet to Come…

So coming up to the present, things suddenly started happening fast.

K. Gheuens pointed out that helical twining could be found in medieval Arma Christi images (the same kind of twining as in the VMS Oak and Ivy plant).

Here is an example of an Arma Christi illumination with helical twining on the pole that was used to bind Jesus:

Arma Christi example image with various implements used to humiliate Christ

And this detail from a Russian Arma Christi illustrates that the number of coins doesn’t have to be 30 (there are 28 in this drawing):

I was thinking out loud on the forum when I wondered whether the major holy days might be encoded right into the VMS plants:

“Could a subset of the plants in the VMS (I’m thinking specifically the big plants and mostly the fanciful ones) represent a visual calendar? A way of expressing something about the most important holy days that was maybe tied in with what they believed about plants?”

And then, in the process of discussing this, and the mystery critter (is it the lamb of God?), mandorlas, sacred hearts, celestial flyers (“zoomers”), and poles in the Arma Christi in medieval manuscripts, K. Gheuens did some research on mandorlas and posted this blog, which I think is a must-read for every Voynich researcher.

https://herculeaf.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/blood-roots-and-lance-leaves/comment-page-1/#comment-2782

Because I had also been researching mandorlas, I knew almost instantly that Gheuen’s blog was going to be about the imagery on f17r (note the almond-shaped vagina-like red splotches in the root of the plant), but Gheuens went so far beyond, you could almost call it a bombshell in terms of our thinking about the VMS.

Read the blog and pay special attention to the analogies between some of the more stylized plants (ones that are hard to identify) and the various implements of the Arma Christi. This isn’t just about one plant drawing, it’s about a group of plant drawings. If he’s right, it will be the first time someone has convincingly discerned the meaning and inspiration behind a group of the less naturalistic plants.

As an aside, suns and moons with faces are generally associated with alchemical manuscripts from the later 15th and 16th centuries, and are rare in early medieval manuscripts, but they show up in Arma Christi images, as well.

We’re Not Finished Yet

Now we get to the part about interpretation. It’s one thing to say, hey, I found a picture of a tree-like thing and things twining around it in helical fashion (and this happens very frequently in Voynich research when images are posted without any follow-up to confirm or deny whether the idea has legs). It’s quite another to say, hey, here is a pattern of several illustrations that might have a cohesive explanation.

This is why I am taking Gheuen’s idea seriously. Because there might be a strong enough pattern to help us figure out if he’s right. Plus, the Arma Christi caught my attention because it has talismanic implications, as well, which might tie in with the strange writing in the VMS.

So, in that vein, I’d like to add a few more images that might relate to this in a way I never expected…

Back to the Future

Remember how I said at the beginning of this blog that I mostly gave up on the idea of Jerusalem being the object of the VMS map and moved on to other ideas? I couldn’t quite make it work—at least not as a strip-map or as traditional cartography. Maybe I need to look at it again, but in a slightly different way…

Maybe it’s not quite a map of Jerusalem, maybe it’s Jerusalem in the narrative sense. Take for example this picture, which no doubt has been mentioned in the VMS literature at some point for having a plant with twining, but what especially provoked me to drag it out of my files was the story behind it…

This painting illustrates the Betrayal of Christ (a theme related to the Passion of Christ which is, in turn, related to the Arma Christi) and includes Jerusalem, possibly Babylon (it was frequently included in mappae mundi in the Middle Ages), the Mount of Olives AND a tree with helical twining (the point is that they are all together in one painting):

Painting The Passion of Christ from The Met
The Betrayal of Christ, Bartolomeo di Tommaso, c. 1440s [Gwynne Andrews Fund, The Met]

The painting is part of an altar triptych that illustrates Christ being betrayed and arrested, and the mourning of the death of Christ.

“Maps” like this landscape of hills and castles don’t have to be geographically accurate. Their role is to tell a story. Could the VMS “map” (or parts of it) be a didactic version of one of these stories? Is that why it’s hard to pin down?

A Critical Look at the “Oak and Ivy”

It’s probable that the helical vines on the tree in the triptych painting above are metaphorically related to Arma Christi imagery, which would place the tree iconographically halfway between the Arma Christi “pole with ropes” version and the VMS Oak and Ivy—almost a visual bridge, so-to-speak.

But I now have second thoughts about the VMS tree. Maybe we should examine it again…

The following plant, from a Hebrew manuscript (lower-right), has a hauntingly similar twining pattern to the VMS Oak and Ivy. The main difference is that the VMS main stalk has branches going through rather than around (whether this is deliberate, creative, or a correction for a mistake is not clear). The leaves, however, are quite different, so it’s not a complete match:

VMS Topiary

Maybe the VMS Oak and Ivy is not meant to be two plants, as in herbal manuscripts such as Masson 116 or Sloane 4016. Maybe it’s one plant that has been pruned and twined in topiary style like the one on the right (note how the stalks are attached at the base, which sometimes happens with ivy (it insinuates itself into the bark) but which might mean it’s all one plant with three stalks).

I’ve seen plants where the stalks have been twisted and twined in remarkable patterns very similar to the above painting. Maybe the berries are not ivy berries, maybe they are olives, or something else related to a biblical story.

Now Everything Looks Different

I have to go back and look at everything again. I was almost certain the nymph middle-left on folio 77v represents the birth of Venus (or at least, that she is either Venus or a metaphor for birth), but maybe not.

Voynich Manuscript 77v thumbnail

And maybe the nymph at the top isn’t Cassiopeia after all (although I think Cassiopeia is a very good suggestion for the imperious seated nymph). Maybe the central position is the throne of the last judgment and the nymphs on either side are stand-ins for the angels Michael and Gabriel.

Things are shaking up right now, but maybe that’s a good thing. A new perspective. Let’s see where it leads

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Zoom, Zoom…

2 August 2019

I have a tongue-in-cheek name for the “flying loges” in the Voynich Manuscript…. I call them “zoomers”. They remind me of strap-on rocket-powered vehicles in vintage science-fiction magazines.

They’re vaguely like baptismal fonts or the smaller “holy water” fonts, or the style of pulpit that is elevated and sometimes attached to a wall.

They’re also like loges in medieval family tree drawings, or images of Christ or St. John being baptized. Some look like the undersides of medieval censers or fancy corbels or archway supports. They’re used in many ways in medieval art.

Here are some examples:

Belém tower [Patrick Clenet, Wikipedia]

Balconies and bartizans (overhanging towers) were common on medieval architecture. Their lofty viewpoints and decorative elements make them particularly appealing to illustrators, so it’s not surprising that similar imagery turns up in illuminated manuscripts.

Even so, I’ve never seen any direct analogies to the VMS font-like or rocket-powered versions. As usual, the illustrator had a unique way of presenting nymphs that zoom or hover in the margins like imperious garita-drivers.

There is a lot of variety in the patterns on the containers, each one is different in basic shape. Connections between nymphs are frequent and these too tend to vary:

VMS nymphs in hovering loge-like containers

There’s a certain serious-faced exuberance in these drawings, as though the nymphs are absorbed in their tasks and taking them seriously. The illustrator seems to delight in individualizing the containers.

One source of imagery that seems somewhat similar is the fiery bartizans in some of the alchemical scrolls, like the Ripley scrolls:

George Ripley (c. 1415–1490), best known for inspiring the “Ripley Scrolls” was an alchemist who was probably most active between about 1440 and 1470. Unfortunately, most of the scrolls that are named after him were created in the late 15th century and the 16th century, too late to have inspired the VMS, and we can only guess at the original inspiration. There are many common themes, however, with chemical processes and distillation expressed in metaphysical terms and emblems.

Alchemy was not just about turning cheaper materials into gold (although this was attempted by many alchemists), it also included the refinement of the distillation arts. The above drawings, with flames ejecting from the base of the balconies, is labeled “Spiritus” and “Imbibing” and likely refers to alcoholic distillation rather than chemical interactions between mercury and sulphur.

The VMS drawings are so unconventional in their execution, it’s difficult to know if distillation is intended by some of the drawings.

Here’s a similar drawing with a completely different meaning, imparting a Christian rather than an alchemical/metaphysical message. Drawings with doves and flame-like red lines are used to represent Pentecost:

Emanations from an architectural support (under which is a dove) [BNF NAL 3226]
Emanations from an architectural support (under which is a dove) [BNF NAL 3226]

In this Armenian manuscript, Pentecost is represented with parasol-like red lines emanating from the dove (this reminds me of some of the parasol shapes in the VMS):

Pentecost, Walters 543
Dove emanating blood-colored droplets arranged in a parasol shape above the figure. Pentecost illustration [Armenian, Walters 543]

The same manuscript includes a mandorla-style circular rainbow rather than a double-arched rainbow as was more common in central and northern Europe:

Round double-rainbow, Walters 543

A Touch of Color

In addition to numerous zoomers, the VMS includes rainbows. For example, f82v has a double rainbow, a convention that usually refers to divinity and higher powers in medieval art. Something wavy seems to be attached to or pouring out of each of the ends.

On either side are nymphs in loges, with another closer to the rainbow with her legs in the pond. To the far right is a cloudlike shape that looks like it might be rising up out of the water or, alternately, raining something into the pool below. The nymph to the right is holding or fending off a pipelike object with something blue streaming into or out of the bottom.

The palette is quite restrained, mostly green, a bit of blue, and a touch of rouge on the nymphs:

VMS 82v double rainbow

In medieval art, the double rainbow is frequent in Bible illustrations in manuscripts and church alcoves as a metaphor for a celestial throne. Below is a common theme of judgement. Note the double rainbow and two celestial beings in cloudlike “loges” on either side of the main figure (usually God or Jesus), with the lower halves of their bodies not visible:

Judgment, with angels and a double rainbow [The Met 1998.179]

This well-populated illustration also has double rainbows with celestial beings on either side, but their bodies have not been placed in cloudlike containers. Instead, their legs have been covered to the ankles with only their feet showing, so chopping off the lower half of the bodies was not characteristic of every illustration:

Double rainbows as a throne in the Last Judgment, Clocher, Cologne, c. 1435
The Last Judgment, Lochner, Cologne, c. 1435

In this example, which I have posted previously, there is a double rainbow and the lower halves of the figures in the upper archway are obscured by the terrain, as though they were standing in water or clouds:

Last Judgement, Getty Open Content Program

In this drawing, there is only one rainbow, but note the cloudbands on each end, and how the lower bodies of the figures in the upper portion are not shown, as in previous examples. There is a general trend, in these kinds of drawings, to identify celestial beings or “people of the stars” by obscuring their lower bodies:

I wanted to post this one for contrast. In France and Germany one sees a mixture of double rainbows and mandorlas (an almond- or sometimes race-track-shaped rainbow). In Italy, there are also sometimes double rainbows, but the mandorla appears to be more popular:

Oval rainbow in the 
Last Judgment, Giotta, Padua, c. 1306
Last Judgment, Giotta, Padua, c. 1306

This one from Liége is more similar to the VMS arrangement, a double rainbow with two figures with their lower bodies obscured by cloudband shapes, and note also that the ends of the rainbows also have cloudband shapes.

Cloudbands are not visually the same as VMS loges, but the idea might be the same, and clouds create water droplets, so maybe the VMS wavy lines coming from the ends of the rainbows are rain. Note also the “flower loge” in the left margin. It was acceptable for the lower bodies to be placed in a variety of container styles:

Double rainbows and cloudband loges in The Last Judgment, Liége W.12
The Last Judgment, Liége W.12

This example from northwest Spain is earlier than the others (10th century) and does not explicitly include the rainbows, but the subject matter is similar, there are many curved shapes, and I was wondering if the hornlike structures in the upper corners might be parallels to the strange blobby thing on the right side of the VMS double-rainbow drawing:

Judgment and ascension in an illumination from northwest Spain (10th century)

Connecting the Dots

But is there a way to move beyond visual similarity and find relationships between themes in different parts of the manuscript?

Could there be a connection between these odd structures on the “bio” and pool pages and the VMS rosettes folio?

I’ve posted blogs suggesting that the VMS rosettes on the “map folio might be better understood if they are visualized as layers. One possibility is interpreting the corner rosettes as a map (and possibly also a representation of the elements), while the “upper” layer might be medieval cosmology.

Maybe the center rosette is the cosmic connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.

I can see other ways of dividing up the rosettes, as well, but let’s keep it simple and assume there might be something abstract or cosmological about parts of the rosettes folio, and that it might not all be “one thing”:

VMS "map" envisioned as two different planes

Now look at this folio from the http://justmusing.net/2009/03/ Visconti Hours. Even though the style and viewpoint are different from the VMS “map” folio, there are thematic similarities.

Note the container-like architectural “fancy towers”. They don’t really look like the towers in VMS Rotum5, they look like Jewish spice boxes, but the idea is similar to the “towers” in the center of the VMS “map”, as are the ray-like textures. Note also the naturalistic landscape with tors and castles at the top, similar to the castles and escarpments in the VMS:

Textures and towers in the Visconti Hours

Now let’s jump back to the VMS nymphs in zoomers… here is an illustration of the “celestial court” in the Le Plessis-Trévise Visconti Hours. Click on it to see it full-sized. This one is worth a second look.

Note the ladies around the edges, suspended in loges and on platforms, each with a different attribute, and how they are connected by “pipes”. It’s a much more elaborate drawing than the VMS nymphs-in-loges, but many of the conceptual elements are the same:

Visconti Hours "Celestial Court" ladies with attributes

So even though the VMS drawings are quite individualized, there seem to be common themes.

But like the Ripley Scrolls, the Visconti Hours is a bit late to have informed the VMS, and is stylistically very different. And we have to keep in mind that towers, creation, and judgment are common to many manuscripts. Is there something with the same motifs in an earlier (and possibly cruder) version?

Seeking that Special Resonance

I’ve mentioned numerous times on the Voynich.ninja forum that manuscripts from some of the Carthusian monasteries have qualities more akin to the VMS. In particular, BL Add ms 37049 (The Desert of Religion) embodies a similar zeitgeist in terms of the drawing style and the way the drawings inhabit the margins with the text often wrapping in around them.

The text rambles across the pages. There are no prick marks to guide the scribe. The marginal drawings are charming and rather primitive. Some of the text is squeezed within curving bands. Large parts of it are in verse, which means there is greater repetition than in regular texts:

Carthusian Desert of Religion "Man's Lyfe"

However, The Desert of Religion (and other miscellany) is written on paper, which rang caution bells for me. Like the Visconti Hours, it might be too late to have influenced the VMS.

The estimated origin is between 1460 and 1500 at a monastery in northern England, but it has some interesting variations on traditional themes that might be worth mentioning.

Traditional Themes in The Desert of Religion

Now, a slight digression. This section is not specifically about T-in-O maps (which I’ve discussed in previous blogs), but about how they are usually represented…

Folio 2v of Add ms 37049 (The Desert of Religion) is a simplified mappa mundi in T-in-O form, with a VMS-like double-infurled cloudband to represent air (ayer):

Carthusian T-in-O map

East is at the top, but Jerusalem is not in the center. Instead, there’s a cluster of buildings in the upper-right labeled Syria. The most prominent building in the “Europea” section is Roma, and “Affrica” is dotted with European-looking houses and a cathedral.

Below the drawing, it explains how the earth was bequeathed to the three sons of Noah after the great flood (the basis of the T-in-O configuration as discussed in a previous blog).

So what happened to Jerusalem? It’s usually front-and-center in most T-in-O maps. Why is it different in this manuscript? Was it dissed? Actually the opposite is true. The creators gave it a full page on the next folio, and this is what caught my attention…

I sometimes wonder if the VMS was created this way—with traditional themes divided up in less traditional ways. Perhaps ideas that are usually represented on a single page have been spread across more folios. If so, common motifs may be harder to recognize.

The following section is illustrated in comic-panel style, and again we see the style of scalloped cloudband that was popular by this time, along with rows of stars:

Examples of double-infurled cloudband in MS Add 37049

Note how the main figure of these festivities has been drawn with unusually short legs and a large head (not unlike the VMS zodiac males), and the couple has two right hands clasping in the traditional marriage pose (similar to VMS Gemini):

Add Ms 37049 fest body proportions

Then we move to the story of the crucifixion and the ascension, where there is a rainbow separating the earth from the heavens, with a small cloudband at each end. The celestial figures at the top have their lower bodies obscured. The text is fitted into “ribbon” label at the top:

Christ's ascension

The VMS has several rainbows, but rather than cloudbands, there is something that appears to be fluid flowing into or out of each end:

VMS big rainbow f83v

This is also true of the double rainbow on the later page. Are these meteorological substitutions for cloudbands?

In the following illustration we see God’s emissary (the dove with halo) near a ribbon label, describing the forgiveness of misdeeds:

God's bird with cloudband

Which shows up again later, as a plummeting bird and rays:

Add 37049 plummeting bird and ras

The VMS has something that is thematically similar on f86v, a bird near the top of the folio flying out of (or nearby) a cloudlike scaly shape. The lines and dots could be anything: air, spiritual essence, water (possibly a deluge?), so it’s hard to tell if there is any narrative relationship, but I include it to call attention to the bird and its position within the emanations:

BIrd on VMS f86v

The Desert of Religion also makes generous used of scalloped nebuly lines, stars, and rays.

In this drawing, the illustrator borrowed the plant-platform motif common to genealogy diagrams. It’s not too much of a stretch to recast them as zoomers connected by flowing streams as occurs in the VMS:

Crucifixion illustrated with genealogy-style motif.

This manuscript has another commonality with the VMS… numerous candelabra-like drawings of plants (see K. Gheuen’s blog for a more complete discussion of interesting menorah-like plant drawings). We don’t know what they represent in the VMS, but here they serve as guideposts to a spiritual life and each plant is drawn differently, with many of them almost looking like real plants:

The leaves describe virtues, vices, and numerous other concepts related to the battle between good and evil within a soul striving to live a spiritual life.

In addition to rainbows and plants, there are numerous coffins and skeletons in shrouds. Judging by the smile on its face, this one likes being a corpse (or maybe likes the view):

The commentary next to most of these smiling skeletons relates to the temporary nature of the corporeal body, and how it wastes away (the implication being that one should nourish and protect the longer-lasting spirit).

In medieval manuscripts, blank eyes usually represent a corpse or sometimes “extras” (people who are added around the central figures to flesh out the crowd). The arms of this nymph are bound as though in a shroud:

VMS drawings of nymphs in flying loges

I’m fairly sure the nymph in the above drawing is a corpse, but I’m less sure about the following nymph (maybe she’s dreaming), but the idea of “levels” in both compositions is intriguing.

Here we have the corpse at the bottom, and above it elements that obscure the lower part of the figure, one with a cloudband-like “parasol” above the nymph’s head (tent-like parasols were used to denote authority in medieval texts). Maybe a VMS parasol is a stand-in for a halo or a way to symbolize authority. On the right, the “zoomer” is a cloudband:

VMS prone nymph and ADD 37049 corpose

One small digression, before summing up… I’ve frequently said that the seven stars on VMS f68r don’t have to represent Pleiades, that there are other possibilities (it’s possible they are the Pleiades, but I don’t want to assume they are until there’s evidence). The Desert of Religion includes seven stars to represent the seven monks who started the Carthusian order in the 11th century:

Carthusian founders represented by seven stars.

_____________________________________________________________

Summary

The VMS doesn’t feel overtly Christian to me. It never has. My first impression 12 years ago was Pagan or clinical-gynecological, and when I saw the text on 116v, I wondered if the fractured German might be Yiddish. I’m not sure it is (any foreigner who knew a few words in German but was struggling with grammar could have written it), and the note on 116v might not be contemporary with the main text, so I’m keeping all possibilities open for now.

Even though it’s full of loges and connections between them, it doesn’t feel like family tree imagery either (except maybe the clothed figures on f71v in the zodiac-figures section).

So is it Christian imagery artfully disguised?

I’m still on the fence about whether VMS illustrations are direct references to Christian themes. The way objects are put together has echoes of Christian imagery, as can be seen from the numerous examples posted in this and previous blogs, but the creator could still have been Pagan, Jewish, Moslem, or Agnostic living in a dominantly Christian society.

Everyone in western society was exposed to Christian illustrative traditions, especially those who could read, and people from all religions are generally interested in themes like life, death, and the afterlife, especially those living at a time when plague was always around the next corner. Maybe someone Christian or non-Christian borrowed what was relevant to their conception of the VMS and ignored the rest.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 All Rights Reserved

VMS Hot Spots

20 May 2019          

I am fond of pyrotechnics and once kayaked out to see a giant fireworks display raining flames on the water.

It was risky. Powerboats with drunk pilots whooshed around me in the dark. To add to the adrenaline, sparks were landing on my shoulders and pfushed and sizzled against the kayak. They could have ignited my clothing or hair… but I loved the front-row seat.

If you can’t resist fireworks, imagine squinting into the middle of a diamond-studded vortex, sparks exploding all around you, with 8-foot swells lifting the boat closer to the blast. It’s awesome.

So it’s natural for me to want to find volcanoes in the VMS “map”. I’ve mentioned volcanoes numerous times on my blog and on the forum, have admitted that the Naples area is on my top-5 list of locations for the VMS “map” (it’s not my only idea, but it was the first region I studied in depth after a long investigation of the water-gardens at the villa d’Este). Recently, I wrote in more detail about volcanoes and mud vents.

Historical Precedent

The idea of volcanoes on the “map” foldout is not new. I took it for granted that many people probably saw them as volcanoes. A quick Google search as I was writing this blog brought up volcano references from 1996 and there are surely some older than that, considering there’s more than one rotum that could be interpreted as a volcano.

Rotum1 (top-left circle) looks like a mountain or gaping maw. Rotum7 (bottom-left), could be flows of water, but could also be flows of lava.

Similarly there are spewy mounds between the rota that might represent volcanoes or mud vents, but they might also be geysers or natural springs.

I’ve suggested Rotum3 might be the remains of a volcanic crater (e.g., the island of Nisida, which has a small crater-shaped harbor facing the sea, with remains of an ancient castle wall on the ridge).

I’ve also mentioned Vesuvius, the island of Sicily, and volcanic areas around Damascus, Azerbaijan, and the region around Ischia. Even though there are numerous possibilities, Naples is one of my favorites because it has ancient pools that potentially connect volcanic “hot spots” with thermal bathing.

Eruptions in the 14th and 15th Centuries

In 1302, there was a “spatter cone” eruption on Ischia (you can see a debris field to the lower right on this old map labeled “Locus terribilis…”):

Ischia and volcanic debris field

In 1329, 1333, and 1381 Abraham Rees describes major eruptions of Mt. Etna. These kinds of events could have been handed down as oral or written history to the creator of the Voynich Manuscript. But are they reflected in the VMS “map”?

Cheshire One More Time (and Hopefully the Last)

Gerard Cheshire has based his entire “proto-Romance” linguistics solution around this very premise. In his recent paper he claims the VMS “map” documents a heroic rescue from a volcanic eruption.

In the previous two blogs, I commented on the linguistic flaws in his arguments. In this blog, I’ll quickly summarize his historical assertions.

Cheshire contends that nuns in the Castello Aragonese, off Ischia, wrote the VMS, and that the “map” documents the rescue from a 1444 eruption of Vulcano (in the Aeolian islands).

Other than the eruption, these ideas don’t seem to be supported by facts, …

I’ll continue looking, but I haven’t found any evidence that nuns lived on Ischia prior to c. 1600 or that they lived in King Alfonso’s Castello in the 15th century as Cheshire claims. The castle was built in 1441 just off Ischia, as shown in the diagram on the right. Cheshire writes that this is where the VMS originated.

The following timeline shows some key events related to Cheshire’s theory that appear to be at odds with his claims:

Timeline of key events in contradiction to G. Cheshire's timeline

Cheshire says that Maria of Castile organized a rescue from an eruption of Vulcano. The only rescue mission I came across was the liberation of Alfonso and his brother when they were captured in Naples. If any historian has evidence that Maria of Castile ferried victims away from a volcanic eruption in 1444, feel free to comment below.

As much as I like the idea, the interpretation of the VMS map as one or more volcanoes is problematic when applied to the Naples area. There are two sets of Ghibelline merlons on the VMS “map” that don’t mesh well with Naples. In the mid-15th century, this style of battlement was mostly confined to parts of what we now call northern Italy. For this reason, I have never committed fully to Naples and have continued researching the other possibilities on my list…

Lava and Lavage

Let’s assume for a moment that the various vents and flows on the VMS “map” are streams and sources of water, which may or may not have a volcanic source…

Picture of overhanging cave and bathing pool of San Filippo

One of my other favored locations is an area with numerous hot springs, including Bagni San Filippo, Bagnore, and Saturnia.

Of particular interest are the natural spring areas of Tuscany, such as San Filippo, where thermal pools, dripping foliage, and calciferous stalactite formations are nestled in a picturesque setting of rivers and woods—just the thing to inspire drawings of nymphly bathing and grotto-like archways and caves.

Some of the pools have calciferous walls that hold the water in step-like terraces. Others are ringed with stone walls that have been built and rebuilt for thousands of years.

Some pools appear bright blue, others green.

Sparkling calciferous pools in Bagni San Filippo [Detail courtesy of Il Vechhio]

Numerous waterfalls carve pathways through the rocks to feed the step formations:

Picture of VMS bathing pools with nymphs.

This by itself is not enough to connect San Filippo, Saturnia, or Monticiano hot springs with the VMS. There are thousands of hot springs throughout Europe, in Turkey, Germany, eastern Europe, several regions of Italy, and Sicily.

What interests me about the hot springs in Tuscany is that they are near a stronghold for Ghibelline sympathizers, which might explain the swallowtail merlons:

Pic of Ghibelline merlons on VMS "map"

Some people have suggested that the VMS pools might be color-coded for fresh or salt water. I think this is possible, especially if the pools represent something less literal than bathing pools. But, if they are bathing pools, maybe the colors represent hot or cold water. It was believed (and still is) that alternating between different temperatures can be therapeutic.

It was also believed that pools with certain temperatures and mineral balances were good for particular parts of the body, which might explain some of the drawings in the “bio” section. There’s no guarantee the different sections of the VMS relate to each other, but I’m hoping they do, because a holistic approach, on the part of the designer, appeals to me.

Moon-Shaped Medieval Castles

If the “stars” on Rotum3 (upper-right) are meant to represent water, then it’s possible it is a moon-shaped island with a castle at the top. It’s one of the reasons I think it could be an island in the Naples area. There are several crater-shaped islands, including Nisida.

In Greece, Santorini is similar (I’ve been there and if you scramble up Mesa Vuono mountain, you get a real sense of the vastness of the crater).

But if the “map” represents Tuscany, where would you find a moon-shaped island? This might be a bit of a stretch, but this 1664 map of Elba, an island off the coast of Tuscany, has a very interesting drawing of a moon-shaped castle-complex labeled Cosmopoli, with a man-made bridge connecting it to Elba. It’s not on a steep hill, like Nisida, but at least it has some of the characteristics of Rotum3:

Rotum3 isn’t necessarily an island, it might just be a stopping point on a strip map, but if it is an island, there are a few locations that could account for its distinctive shape.

Along the Pathway

Pic of ledges on Voynich Manuscript "map"

There’s another detail on the VMS map that can relate to Tuscany… on the pathway between Rotum2 and Rotum3 are some undulating ledges that look somewhat like dunes, possibly sand dunes.

If you turn them, however, so that the tower and wall are facing up, then they look more like solid escarpments.

They’re too steep and narrow to be vineyards, but they reminded me of something, something I couldn’t put my finger on at first…

Then one morning I woke up and remembered—marble quarries, the mountains of Carrara, pathways and ledges.

Here’s a photo…

Note the textural differences between the paths winding up into the mountains and the escarpments where the marble has been quarried in stepwise fashion.

We don’t know exactly how the quarry looked in the middle ages, but the mountains have been mined for hundreds of years, supplying marble for pillars, walls, mosaics, and classical statues that grace ancient buildings. Now marble is used largely for floor tiles and countertops.

It’s not a perfect match for the VMS drawing, but it does have a similar feeling, so maybe the “dunes” represent some pathway through mountains.

Summary

I can’t possibly cover every detail of the map in one blog, this is enough for now. Much of this I’ve mentioned before, but it illustrates that there are many ways to interpret the “map”, more of which I’ll cover in future blogs.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Cheshire reCAsT

7 May 2019

You may remember an announcement by Gerard Cheshire that he had found a proto-Italic solution for the VMS. There was no corroboration for his theory by any of the scholars who are well-acquainted with the text and, to date, I haven’t seen Cheshire provide an objective verifiable solution.

He has now completed his Ph.D. and is making a bold and possibly proposterous claim that he solved the Voynich Manuscript shortly after discovering it and that his so-called solution “was developed over a 2-week period in May 2017” [Tandfonline.com 2019 Apr 29].

Who would claim to solve the VMS and then post a series of papers (Jan. to Apr. 2018) based on a few isolated sections that do not provide a convincing solution? Proposing that it is an extinct language is no more valid than any other VMS theory.

Since I am not willing to pay $43 (or even $4) to download the current version of his paper, I will restrict my remarks to the last of the previous papers, dated April 2018, which I only just read for the first time today (the link to Cheshire’s paper redirects from The Bronx High School of Science student newspaper’s site to sites.google.com).

Cheshire’s “Linguistic Dating” Theory

In the introductory section Cheshire states, “…in this regard, manuscript MS408 is ‘manna from heaven’ to the linguistic community, as it offers the components necessary to compile a lexicon of proto-Romance words, thanks to the accompanying visual information.”

He then claims that his “proto-Italic alphabet is shown to be correct, so we know that the spelling of the words is also correct, even if unknown”, and then goes on to say that pages without illustrations “will, of course, be more of a challenge…”

Besides the dubious claim that the “proto-Italic alphabet is shown to be correct…”, I’d like to point out that most VMS folios include illustrations. If you can decipher 200 pages with help from illustrations, then the ones without shouldn’t be too difficult, considering that Voynichese is reasonably consistent from beginning to end.

Cheshire then claims labels are easier to interpret (personally I haven’t seen anyone translate the labels in any verifiable way, but let’s continue):

“The longer sentences are filled with conversational connectives, pronoun variants, singular-plural terms, gender specifics and so on, that make it necessary to identify the unambiguous marker words and then make sense of the equivocal words by a process of sequential logic.”

This stopped me in my tracks. One of the characteristics of the Voynichese that truly stands out is the similarity and repetitiveness of beginnings and endings. How can one identify singulars, plurals and gender specifics in text where the beginnings and ends appear to be stripped of their diversity? I guessed that Cheshire must be either shuffling spaces or breaking up tokens (or both).

The 9-Rotum Foldout as Example

Thumbnail of VMS 9-rotum foldout.

To demonstrate his claim that the VMS uses a proto-Romance language and proto-Italic alphabet, Cheshire presents a partial analysis of the 9-rotum foldout folio, which he refers to as the Tabula regio novem.

He claims the correlations, “…are beyond reasonable doubt in scientific terms. Most of the annotations are translated and transliterated with entire accuracy…”

Another bold claim that doesn’t live up, in my opinion. But let’s look at his analysis…

Cheshire identifies Rotum7 as a volcanic eruption. I think this is possible, based on visual similarity alone, and others have suggested this possibility. However, it could just as easily be an image of mountain springs (the source of water) or a river delta as it spreads out in an alluvial fan or… something else.

So how does Cheshire support his claim?

Rotum7 Translation

Cheshire transliterates the text around the circumference as follows [I’ve added a Voynichese transcript to make it easier for readers to compare them and to see how Cheshire has broken up VMS tokens to create “words”]:

om é naus o’monas o’menas omas o’naus orlaus omr vasaæe or as a ele/elle a inaus o ele e na æina olina omina olinar n os aus omo na moos é ep as or e ele a opénas os as ar vas opas a réina ol ar sa os aquar aisu na

Note that EVA-ot is alternately translated as part of a word or as a separate letter with apostrophe to separate it from the following chunk. The breaking of words in various ways is, of course, subjective interpretation, and would have to be verified by testing the more common divisions on larger chunks of text.

Cheshire translates the above passage as follows:

people and ship in unity take charge mothers/babies of ship to protect life-force pots [he says this is pregnant bellies] yet in he/she at inauspicious/unfavourable he/she is in a/one omen to look it is man not mouse epousee and embrace an opening thus you go but carefully to the queen to facilitate not getting wet with seawater

So before we look into the details of the translation, this supposed narrative seems to me to relate more to river basins and seaports than it does to volcanoes. Cheshire’s contention that this text helps pinpoint the location and time period of the VMS’s creation via a volcanic eruption can definitely be challenged.

But let’s look at the interpretation. Here are some observations:

  • Cheshire has chosen a rare character to represent f/ph, and u/v. Less than 50 instances of one of the most common letters in Latin and Italian in c. 38,000 words of text is hard to believe. In classical Latin versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the u/v character would occur about 15,000 times in 38,000 words (that’s not even including the f).
  • There’s no word “inaus” in Latin, Italian, French, or Spanish (in fact, it’s more Germanic than Romance), so Cheshire has expanded it to mean inauspicious via Latin inauspicatus. Presumably he feels it’s acceptable to subjectively choose which tokens might be truncated.
  • Obviously Cheshire is using variations of “om” to mean homo/people, thus om (people) omas (mothers/babies), omo (man), but he chose to interpret “omenas” as o’menas (take charge) rather than as om enas (people swim). People swimming is arguably more consistent with the surrounding subject matter. This illustrates that his interpretation has a strong element of choice. I’m not even sure why o’menas would mean “take charge”.
  • Some of the translation seems rather nonsensical and hard to relate to volcanoes, such as “to look it is man not mouse and marry and embrace an opening thus you go carefully to the queen to avoid not getting wet with seawater”. Consider that “aisu” is neither Italian nor Latin and the grammar is seriously questionable.
  • I’m not sure why Cheshire seguéd to Persian for “moos” (mouse). Moos is an acceptable alternate spelling for “mus” in western languages. Perhaps it was to justify his choice of Persian to explain another word “omr” which has no equivalents in Romance languages. Going to non-Romance languages when a word doesn’t fit his theoretical framework introduces yet another level of subjective interpretation.
  • The choice of phrase-breaks is clearly also subjective. Cheshire separated “opénas” from “os” even though they go together better than combining “os” with the following phrase. The word “opénas” itself is questionable—it’s not likely to be expressed this way and it could be interpreted quite differently as a penalty, punishment, or even as sympathy.

Overall, there is only a vague coherence to it, one that does not evoke thoughts of volcanoes, and one that makes little grammatical sense.

In his summation of the text, Cheshire does not explain why text unrelated to volcanoes would confirm that the Rotum7 IS a volcano and avoids any explanation of why marriage and the queen would be included.

Confirmation Bias?

In the next section Cheshire identifies the symbol bottom-left as a compass (I personally think it looks more like a sextant, which was used for surveying as well as navigation, but I’m not sure what it represents). His transliteration is “op a æequ ena tas o’naus os o n as aus[pex]”, which he translates to “necessary to equal water balance of ship as it is propitious”.

A compass doesn’t really have anything to do with a ship’s water balance (and doesn’t relate to volcanoes either) and I would like to know why he says “op” means “necessary” when the root “neces-” is common to all major Romance languages. In Romance languages “op” is more likely to equate to “work/produce” than to “necessary”, and once again the grammar is abnormal.

From these two pieces of “translation”, Cheshire takes a logical leap that only two volcanoes might be plausible for Rotum7: Stromboli and Vulcano and states:

“…Vulcano is known to have erupted very violently in the year 1444, which corresponds with the carbon-dating of the manuscript velum: 1404-1438.”

He further translates the Rotum7 inner annotations as “of rock, both directions, not so hot, veers here, it twists, reducing, it slows, middling/forming, of rock it is”.

This could describe mountain springs (the source of water) just as easily as a volcanic eruption. I’m not denying that Rotum7 might be volcanic flow, it’s on my list of possibilities, only that Cheshire’s argument is not as definitive or scientific as he claims. Also, I would like an explanation of how he turned “oqunas asa” into “both directions”.

Origins of Glyph Shapes

Cheshire has this to say about VMS glyph shapes:

“…the symbol is an inverted v with a bar above. It seems to derive from the Greek letter Pi in lowercase (π),…”

I disagree. Pi was rarely written like EVA-x in medieval manuscripts. However, alpha and lambda are sometimes written this way, including Greek, Coptic, and old Russian scripts (I have collected many samples). I think it’s unlikely that EVA-x is based on the shape of Pi.

Rotum7 Side Labels

I can’t go through every translation point-by-point, but if you are reading along, on page 7 of his paper, you’ll notice Cheshire inserted the word “lava” many times when it wasn’t part of the translation. I don’t know if he was trying to convince us or himself.

Note that in two places, he translated “omon” (EVA-otod) as lava. Now take a look at this:

Cheshire translates EVA-otodey as omon ena and EVA-otody as omon ea. In his system, this translates to “lava largest” and “lava smaller”. If this system were applied consistently throughout the manuscript then we are looking at root-suffix constructions, with EVA-ey as largest and EVA-edy as smaller. This has significant implications for interpretation of the rest of the text but Cheshire didn’t address this.

If you’ve been paying attention to the translations, you might have noticed certain inconsistencies. Cheshire presents omo as people/humans and omon as lava, and now omona as “big man” (it’s not hard to follow the logic) but does not explain why these words would occur in other places in the manuscript where the context does not seem relevant. He also inserts increasing levels of subjective interpretation to explain the “story” behind the rosettes folio and asserts that Rotum8 depicts emergency refuge from the eruption and Rotum 9 is emergency relief in the form of free bread on tables.

Summary

As for the letters “o” that occur so frequently at the beginnings of words, Cheshire variously interprets them as conjunctions and articles. I’m not going to argue with this because I think it’s possible the over-abundant leading-“o” glyphs could have a special function as markers or grammatical entitites, but even with this flexibility, Cheshire’s grammar falls apart upon inspection. Even notes and labels usually exhibit certain patterns of consistency, that are not readily apparent in the translation.

I’m also not going to argue with the choice of location for these volcanoes (if they are volcanoes), because I’ve considered the Naples area many times, have blogged about it, and it’s still on my list of favored locations.

But I have trouble accepting the translation in its current form because

  • there are a lot of nonsensical word combinations,
  • there’s almost no grammar,
  • the letter distribution is quite different from Romance languages (it would take a whole blog to discuss this aspect of the text, but take 4 as an example, which almost exclusively is at the beginnings of tokens—Cheshire relates it to “d”, and “9” which is usually at the end and sometimes at the beginning, but almost never in the middle, which he designates as “a”),
  • the words still match the drawings if the drawings are interpreted differently (which means the relationship isn’t proven yet),
  • some of the transliterated “words” don’t show any relationship to Romance word-structures (and the author neglected to explain how specific non-Romance words were derived), and
  • the same words (e.g., “na”) are sometimes interpreted differently.

If Rotum7 turns out to be flows of water, rather than flows of lava, Cheshire’s arguments about time period and location are seriously weakened. Even if it turns out to be lava, the problems with the translation have to be addressed, because it seems more relevant to water than it does to lava.

Consider also that Cheshire’s word “naus” (EVA-daiin) is translated as nautical vessels, but the author doesn’t explain why this exceedingly common Voynich chunk, that is usually at the ends of tokens, would occur in almost every line, and sometimes more than once per line, throughout the manuscript.

Cheshire hasn’t given a satisfactory explanation of why a mid-15th-century scribe would use an undocumented proto-Italian script from c. 700 C.E. or earlier.

And let’s be honest, the translations are semantically peculiar. The human mind is designed to construct meaning from small clues, to fill in the gaps, so it’s easy to read meaning into almost any collection of semi-related words, but it’s very difficult to confirm anything that doesn’t quite hold together in normal ways.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved


Method in Medieval Maps

24 March 2019

In a previous blog, I noted some of the ways that “mounds” on the VMS rosettes folio might be interpreted. It was barely an introduction, so this is a continuation, with “mounds” discussed in the context of medieval mappae mundi.

The blog format is too constrained to cover all the mappae mundi, so I’ve selected these as the main examples:

  • Sawley (England, c. 1110), Corpus Christi College
  • Ebstorf (Germany? 13th c), original destroyed, facsimile in Ebstorf cloister
  • Hereford (England, late 13th c), Hereford Cathedral
  • Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 782 (late 13th c)
  • Walsperger (Constance, 1448)

Others are identified as they appear.

Basic Format

Western mappa mundae usually place Jerusalem at or near the center, emphasizing its historical and spiritual importance, as in this passage in Ezekial:

Thus saith the Lord God, This is Jerusalem, I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries, that are round about her.

Ezekial 5:5
four examples of Jerusalem from medieval mappae mundi

In the example maps, each depiction of Jerusalem is different, as follows:

  • Ebstorf: Rectangular aerial view of walls, quite detailed, showing towers, bricks/stones, and battlements, with an image of Christ in the center. The palette is bright and varied.
  • Hereford: Circular aerial view, with crenelations and 4 plus 4 structures facing the center, in varying shades of brown ink.
  • S-G 782: A frontal image of a building with towers, crenelations, a saddleback portal, and two crosses, embellished with turquoise. The Sawley mappa is similar except that Jerusalem is slightly off-center from the Cyclades, and it has a dome instead of a saddleback portal entrance.
  • Walsperger: A more naturalistic view of a walled city with two tall round, layered towers. The palette is green, red, and a pale brownish amber—similar to the VMS except there’s no blue.

Each one is different because the architecture is stylized or entirely fictional. Jerusalem is identified chiefly by the label and its position on the map.

General Shape

Mappae perimeters are usually shaped like a race-track, almond, or circle, ringed by a body of water. This shape may reflect the idea of the map as a “mirror” of the world (the mirror thus reflecting an image given by God). Note that medieval lawbooks, and the scrying glass of John Dee, were also referenced as “mirrors”. They were seen as a vehicle to channel messages from a higher power.

The Sawley map (c. 1110) is oriented with east at the top and the Cyclades in the center (with Jerusalem nearby). Angels preside in each corner. Mountain ranges are lines of small bumps. Specific mountains, like Mount Atlas (bottom-right), are taller mounds:

The Sawley mappa mundi c. 1110

On some maps, the surrounding waters are embellished with fish, boats, monsters, named or unnamed islands, or people.

Sometimes, God or Jesus is shown at the top or incorporated into the content as head, hands, and feet at the outer edges:

picture of ebstorfer mappa mundi

The organization of the towns and landmarks is based partly on biblical events after the flood:

These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations among their people: and out of these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

Genesis 10

All ethnic groups were said to be descended from Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and the earth was basically “assigned” to their descendants.

By the Middle Ages, mapmakers had a greater awareness of the extents of human populations, the arctic, antarctic, and the east, so they added them to the biblical interpretation while still retaining the basic ideas. Some of these maps were stylized into a T-in-O shape (or a four-part shape similar to a T-in-O).

Thus, we have Asia being roughly half the world, with the rest divided between Europe and Africa (and sometimes the Antipodes are shown as a small section by Africa).

East is Up

In the older mappae mundi, east is usually oriented toward the top. By the 15th century, some maps had south at the top. South was the direction taken by most Europeans for pilgrimmages to Jerusalem, Ethopia, and to reach many of the African and Indian trade routes, so it may have been natural to think of this direction as “up”.

By the end of the 15th century, magnetic compasses were more common and our concept of “up” changed from south to north.

We cannot be sure that the T-in-O on the VMS “map” folio is meant as an orientation symbol (or that the VMS rosettes are strictly geographical) but if it were, it would roughly correspond to compass points as follows:

Orientation of T-in-O shape on Voynich Manuscript "map"

This would put east at the top in relation to the binding, as would be common for the early 15th century.

More Examples

The 11th century Saint-Sever mappa mundi is race-track-shaped, with east at the top. The Mediterranean divides north and south, and the river systems and Black Sea generally separate Europe from Asia. It’s not quite a T-in-O, but it’s easy to see how the idea of T-in-O evolved.

Note how the Saint-Sever mountain ranges are drawn as lines of triangular bumps, and the tall mountain in the upper-left quadrant looks like a pile of scaly bumps, as in the Sawley map shown earlier. To the right is the Red Sea:

Saint-Sever mappa mundi

The Royal Higden map (Royal MS 14 C IX, c. 1350), is the same race-track shape, but the drawing surface is rotated 90°, so that Asia is a larger proportion of the total. Jerusalem is a little above center and Noah’s arc to the left:

The Higden map detail showing Jerusalem and Noah's arc.

Mountains are drawn as circles with a bit of green paint in the middle. This top-view theme of mountains as circles is also quite common. Sometimes the rivers flow from their centers, sometimes from the edges.

Often the tower of Babel is included as a tall, narrow, tiered structure, but it is not always large or prominent on the map. The Higden map has an especially fancy drawing of Babylon and Babel:

Higden map Babylon and Tower of Babel

We often hear about “the seven hills of Rome” but this idea is not usually reflected in medieval mappae mundi. Rome is a fancy building, and the alps are nearby, but the seven hills are not explicitly drawn:

Higden map picture of Rome and the alps

More literal expressions of the seven hills are sometimes found in illuminated manuscripts. These lofty tors reminded me of some of the escarpments in the VMS “map”, but they do not have pathways connecting them:

Detail of Uberti seven hills of Rome

Mons atlas (a mountain created when Atlas was turned to stone by Perseus) is frequently included on mappae mundi. On the Higden map, it is prominently featured at the bottom with a textured mound rather than a simple circle. This region, next to Morocco, is now known as the Atlas range (note also the highly stylized islands off the coast of Africa):

Beatus of Liebana Adam and Eve

Mappae mundi are often crowned with images of Paradise, or of Paradise lost (Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden).

Adam and Eve and the serpent are featured prominently at the top of the map in the Beatus of Liébana map (right), and the NAL 2290 Beatus (early 13c).

The NAL 2290 map is round, with a lively procession of castles and critters in the outer ring of water:

Mappa mundi from BNF NAL 2290

Once again, the mountains are drawn as piles of textured bumps.

The Garden of Eden

In the Middle Ages, Eden or “Paradise” was not always represented by Adam and Eve. Sometimes it was a fancy dwelling with four rivers emanating from its edges, including the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was generally believed that Paradise, the cradle of humanity, was near Mesopotamia, in Armenia.

Walsperger map illustration of Paradise
The Walsperger map illustrates Paradise as an elaborate walled castle with four rivers flowing from its perimeter, two which we recognize as the Tigris and Euphrates.

On the Sawley map (right), Paradise is sketched very simply at the top, somewhat organically enclosed by a “moat” connected to the great waters that ring the perimeter. There are two central circles with lines that probably represent the four rivers in a more abstract way than the Walsperger map.

Other frequent landmarks include Paris, Rome, Galicia, Bethlehem, the mouth of the Nile River (and other important rivers), the sea of Galilee, Black sea, Caspian sea, and the Red Sea (which is often painted red), along with various mountain ranges.

Thus, the maps were not strictly geographical, they combined history, landmarks, the origins and spread of humanity, and sometimes animals common to a particular region. Fictitious races of distorted humans are sometimes included, as well, with imagery that later showed up in manuscripts describing the travels of “John de Mandeville”.

Hints of Itinerary Maps

In Liber Floridus (c. 1113), the map is essentially a T-in-O configuration, but it is arranged a little differently from single-page mappae mundi, with water surrounding an entire quadrant. South is somewhat at the top, but only for parts of the map. Eastern Europe, Italy, Germany, France, and Galicia jostle each other around the edge, and Scandinavia is smaller than Saxony. Rome is emphasized in the upper-right. The orientations shifts slightly depending on where you are on the map:

European quadrant of the Liber Floridus T-in-O map

The emphasis on Rome is two-fold. Not only was it the seat of power for much of Christendom, but it was the destination for many clerics to plead their requests or grievances directly to the pope—in other words, they needed to know how to get there.

River Systems

You’ve probably noticed that river deltas are prominently featured in most of these maps. Paradise, Egypt, Europe, the Black Sea, the Rhine, everywhere you look, there are fanlike fingers representing river systems. This is not surprising since water sustains us, feeds our crops, and provides important transportation routes. The way rivers are represented is much the same in maps from Europe and the Arabic world:

Detail of river delta map and mountain textures labeled in Arabic

On the VMS foldout, Rotum7 has always struck me as similar to an alluvial fan, so much so I have difficulty thinking of alternative explanations. There are mounds in the center, possibly representing mountains as a source of the water. River basins throughout the world have the same basic fan shape.

But… the streaming shapes in Rotum7 are adjacent to the pathway with the Ghibelline merlons. How are we to interpret that?

If this rotum is a river delta, and the merlons represent northern Italy, it’s tempting to interpret it as the Po or Arno river basin. If east is up, then rivers that drain toward the west seem more likely, but I would still caution against taking the T-in-O too literally. If this were a strip map, the orientation could change en route:

Detail of VMS Rotum7 with fan shapes.

I have rotated Rotum7 clockwise so the “labels” are easier to see. Most of the tokens start with o-Ascender, as do those in the “star charts” and “zodiac” sections. For comparison, here is a closeup of Arabic labels at each river mouth, sharing space with coastline symbols:

Arabic river delta labels and coastline symbols

There might be other explanations for Rotum7. Maybe it’s not a drawing of river systems. It could be argued that the image is inverse, with the streams unpainted and the parts in between being something other than water. Perhaps this is smoke or vapor emanating from a thermal crater, rather than a river basin. Thermal baths or steam vents are found in thousands of locations throughout the world including places where there were swallowtail merlons.

Details, Details…

Petrus Vesconti of Genoa produced a number of maps in Venice in the 1320s. His circular mappa mundi has a more practical feel to it than many of the medieval mappa mundi. Vesconti included the rhumb lines common to seafaring charts and the mountains are more naturalistic:

Vesconti 1321 round portolan style map
Upsala mounds representing mountains

The Paris and Upsala maps of Jerusalem include mounds with more stylized textures than those of Vesconti. Each of the three mounds in the Upsala map has a different pattern, but all mean the same thing… mountains.

The Matthew Paris map of Jerusalem clearly shows some of the common features: mountains, city walls, major landmarks, and the mouths of springs:

Paris map of Jeruselam showing mounds and springs

In Liber Floridus, the alps are drawn as a pile of scaly bumps with scepter-like embellishments:

Note how the labels for Burgundia and Aquitanoa have been split into syllables between the major river systems. Is it possible some of the VMS labels have been divided up in the same way so that several are needed to make up one word?

Clearly the use of small heaps of textured bumps to represent mountains is common to medieval maps in several styles. The main difference between the heaps in the VMS and those in other maps are the “spewy” things coming out of them. Are there any medieval maps that are similar?

Mountains with Extra Protruberances

The Beatus of Liebana map exists in a number of versions and was drawn with a variety of textured mounds, as in the Las Huelgas Apocalypse from Spain c. 1220 (Morgan Library):

But it doesn’t have any tufts or spewy things. Neither does this late-medieval copy of an early medieval Arabic map from the Book of Curiosities (Bodley Arab.c.90):

However, other copies of the Beatus map were drawn with feathery “tufts” along the edges, such as the 10th century Escalada Beatus of Valcavado, thought to be from Tábara, Spain:

Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.644, approximately 10th century

In the clearly derivative Beatus below, we see the same features: a mountain in Albania with tufts, (mons aquilo, possibly Mt. Korab?), smaller mountains to the right with feathery tree-like tufts on the earlier Beatus, and individual grainlike tufts on the later one.

To the right and down is a mountain that has both tufts and a poof at the summit. It is labelled mons libanus, the old name for a high peak northwest of Damascus, near the coast:

Detail of the map in the Beatus of Liebana showing protrusions from mountains.

The area around Damascus was volcanically active until the Holocene period and there is an extensive lava field southeast of Damascus, so perhaps the poof refers to volcanic craters.

The VMS also has some tufty looking protrusions on Rotum7 along the edges of the scaly bumps and at the tops of the “mounds”? Might these represent trees in a very abstract way as in the Beatus maps? Might some of the longer ones represent vents as discussed in the previous blog?

Venetian Mappae Mundi

The Giovanni Leardo map of c. 1452/53 is oriented with east and the “earthly paradise” at the top. A calendar fills the outer edge.

The mountains are colored green and pink to help distinguish them from overlapping features, but don’t vary much in texture:

Leardo 1453 map with Paradise and mountain textures

The buildings have a cookie-cutter quality, similar to the mountains, with the more important ones marked with taller or more numerous towers. Jerusalem and Babylon are given special prominence and the Red Sea is bright red:

The Carta Marina, published in Venice a century after the Leardo map (1539), is a very detailed map of Scandinavia and Iceland. Volcanoes are shown as mounds but it’s interesting that fires are raging at the base rather than spewing from the tops as is common on many maps. There is also an interesting twist on rivers, which emerge from pipe-like structures that resemble reservoirs rather than natural springs—a pipelike theme somewhat reminiscent of the VMS:

Carta Marina 1539 detail of Iceland

Two centuries after the VMS, not much had changed in terms of representing mountains. In this 1650 map of Ephraim’s inheritance by Thomas Fuller, we see textured bumps, with higher bumps for taller or more important peaks:

map of Ephraim's inheritance detail of mountain bumps

As in the VMS, sometimes the peaks are topped with fortresses:

Thomas Fuller map detail of castle on hilltop.

Most buildings in medieval maps were fictional. They rarely resembled actual structures.

For a unique synthesis of map and myth, take an hour to peruse the drawings of Opicinus de Canistris, who created a series of maps around the 1340s (Vat.Lat.6435). A supporter of the Guelphs (who, in turn, supported the pope in Rome), the biblical elements are very apparent, but his integration of figure and form have a deft puzzle-like quality that is unlike other maps created in the middle ages and which vaguely reminds me of some of the pond-and-river images in the VMS:

Opicinus de Canistris puzzle-like figures and map elements
Cultural Differences

Arabic maps often share similarities in the ways mountains or rivers are drawn, the 12th century world map by Al-Idrisi is essentially the same as western maps, but there are also some notable differences in maps created by specific map-makers. For example, this 13th-century Zakariya Ibn Muhammad world map, labeled in Arabic, uses scaly textures to represent lakes, rivers, and oceans, and mountains are not included:

13th century map of the world by Zakariya Ibn Muhammad al Qazwini
Zakariya Ibn Muhammad al Qazwini world map from The Wonders of Creation (of which there are quite a few copies) [Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine]
Detail of scaly texts in the al Qazwini world map

Borders

I wanted to make a quick note about borders before summing up. The edges of most mappae mundi are unremarkable, sometimes ringed only by a roughly drawn circle or double line. But some have more elaborate borders.

Here is a circular world map (Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik), in which the outer ring of water is contained within a lace-like pattern of donuts and loops that resembles tatting:

Border of Islamic mappae mundi with lace-like border

The Walsperger map has a flame-like border of triangular ticks:

… somewhat similar to the ticks in the VMS:

It’s not exactly the same—the VMS triangles emerge from a scaly base and the flaglike ticks are disengaged from the triangles—but it caught my attention because the Walsperger map includes other relevant details, like placeholders for zodiac symbols and text written within the perimeters of circles.

Highly schematized mandala-like maps with elaborate edges are also found in Indian maps in the 18th and 19th-centuries:

Schematic form and edges on 19th century Indian maps

The Emerging Renaissance

The c. 1450 “Fra Mauro” mappa mundi illustrates an increasing trend toward realism as the Renaissance took hold in Europe. Paradise has been conspicuously removed from the top, within the map, as was traditional, and placed outside the perimeter, in a corner. It is contained within a circular enclosure, has a daunting pointy fence, and craggy terrain outside the perimeter (does that sound like the VMS?).

As with its predecessors, there are four rivers running from the edge:

Here is another version with the same basic features:

If it is a Map, Where Does the VMS Fit?

If we assume for the moment that the rosettes foldout is a map, could it be interpreted as a mappa mundi? The perimeter is not round or oval and each rotum is quite large and distinct, larger than one would expect for a world map, but it might be a good exercise to see if it works.

Perhaps, like so many medieval maps, the central rosette is Jerusalem:

Detail of Voynich Manuscript rotum5

This is believable, as Jerusalem is frequently drawn as a circular enclosure with numerous towers. Sometimes stars are included. The enclosure is often a wall of stones or bricks.

Following this line of thought, and depending on the orientation, the bottom-left rosette with rivers or vapors running out of it, or the more symbolic one in the top-middle might be interpreted as Paradise.

Years ago, I thought the Tower in the Hole might be Pisa or, if the map represents Naples, one of the structures coming out of the ancient tunnels that still exist underneath the city. But another possibility is the tower of Babylon, which is almost always included in mappae mundi.

If east is at the top, as per the small T-in-O, then the rotum middle-right could be an aerial view of the lighthouse of Alexandria (see the previous blog for a detailed look at Rotum6):

What about the Swallowtails?

But then it gets complicated… if east is at the top, that would place the Ghibelline merlons in the west (at the bottom) relative to Jerusalem, suggesting that the map as a whole represents the Mediterranean region, rather than the whole world. This, in itself isn’t a problem, but then how does one account for all the other rota?

That Nagging Feeling That it Doesn’t Add Up

The problem is, it doesn’t feel right. On a subjective level, it’s like trying to push square pegs into round holes. Some parts of the VMS “map” can be compared to mappae mundi, such as the way the textured details are drawn. In other ways, it feels more like a strip map (from the beginning, I’ve felt it was more suggestive of a journey than of a world map).

It feels even less like a portolan. In general, portolans were more practical than mappae mundi, and more geographically literal than either mappae mundi or strip maps. They were more likely to include detailed coastlines, navigational lines (wind-rose or “rhumb” lines), and a variety of mariners’ symbols.

Here’s an early and fairly simple version of a portolan with reference lines and numerous harbor markings along the coast of Alexandria:

Example of early portolan coastline by Alexandria
Portolan detail of the Mediterranean coast, c. 1325 to c. 1350 (prob. Italian origin). Library of Congress. Full version can be seen here: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g5672m.ct000821

The children of seafaring merchants were expected to learn math and to know it well, including fractions, distance computation, percentages, area computations, “meet-in-the-middle” problems, differences in speed related to the number of sails, and much more (for examples and a fun read, see Dotson’s Merchant Culture in Fourteenth Century Venice).

With this emphasis on analytical skills, one can expect portlans to be more detailed and accurate than charts based on biblical stories that are intended for general education.

Only a few of the elements of early portolan maps are found in the VMS and they are not synthesized in the same way but, before rejecting them entirely, I think it’s worth illustrating at least one of the later-medieval portolans because they started adapting ideas from mappae mundi.

Evolution of Portolans

By the 15th century, portolans were more detailed and colorful, and included some of the elements more common to mappae mundi: scales and textured mounds for mountains, river deltas colored blue, and more elaborate architectural drawings for cities (both real and mythical). But they continued to include practical elements such as rhumb lines and numerous port symbols, as in this chart by Spanish cartographer Gabriel de Vallsecha:

Babylonia detail in portolan by Gabriel de Vallsecha
A walled city with numerous towers represents Babylonia in this detail of a Mediterranean portolan by Gabriel de Vallsecha, 1447 [BnF CPL GE C-4607]

Ironically, at the same time that portolans were becoming more expressive, mappa mundae were becoming more naturalistic and accurate than traditional T-in-O maps.

Evolution in World Maps

The 15th-century world map of Pirrus de Noha is clearly more geographical than Biblical. The coastlines, mountain ranges and river systems are recognizable without labels. North is at the top, and the eastern portion stretches past the Caucasus, a region only vaguely charted on earlier maps:

Pirrus de Noha 15th century world map
The date of the Pirrus de Noha map is unknown, but it is bound in a manuscript dated 1414. It is thought to be a synthesis of information from Ptolemaic and nautical sources.

In the Pirrus map, the focus is on land masses, so the harbor markers and rhumb lines common to portolans are not present, but the VMS “map” shows no signs of being geographical like the Pirrus map—I included it mainly for contrast to the VMS, and to show some details of mountains and river systems, which are similar to most maps of the time:

Detail of mountains in Pirrus de Noha map

Thus, semi-geographical maps, and the 1439 portolan below, represent mountains as rows of triangles or scales, with taller heaps for individual peaks:

Portolan chart with navigation lines, land forms, sovereigns, major ports and cities, and scaly mountains and mounds, and a few animals, as well. [attributed to Gabriel de Vallsecha, 1439, Palma, image courtesy of Maritime Museum, Barcelona]

It should be clear by now that the VMS is arranged differently from most medieval maps. It’s not overtly similar to mappae mundi or portolans, but there are other kinds of maps that were used regularly in the Middle Ages that might qualify.

Is the VMS like itinerary maps?

Itinerary maps are lists of major landmarks and destinations along the way. Sometimes distance is noted in units of time rather than units of measure. Some itineraries are so detailed, they are like short books, with descriptions of places to sleep or to visit within a local community, others are brief lists of town names in the order in which they were to be visited.

Many are not illustrated, so I took a small section of the 16th-century itinerary of Bartolomeo Fontana (U Penn Codex 451) and mapped the destinations as an example:

Example of destinations mapped from a historic itinerary for a journey

This is a fairly short trip compared to some of them, and yet it is eight destinations. If the VMS is an itinerary map and IF it is drawn in two planes, then the number of destinations is very small.

Before we look at strip maps, I’d like to mention a map that doesn’t fit the common categories. It includes elements of both geography and itinerary maps, but leans toward geographical.

A Spartan Format

When I first found this c. 1425 map, the folio was zoomed out and I saw only a grid with some red dots. The preceding folios were star charts, so I assumed the red dots were stars, as well. When I zoomed in, I realized it was a semi-geographical map listing locations from Germany to the Levant and Greece in the southeast, and to Spain in the southwest.

I’ve transliterated and translated some of the better-known locations to make it easier to read. It’s interesting to note the changes in some of the names. For example, Herbipolis is today’s Würzburg. It also provides some insight into the towns that were significant to whoever created the map.

The top of the page is roughly west rather than north and it’s not strictly geographical, even though it’s placed on a grid. These “wandering” compass points are common to itinerary maps and strip maps since the orientation of the folio can be inferred from the names. To give a general idea of the orientation, I added a compass.

Oddly, Nuremberg is shown west of Cologne and, even more surprising, Rome is off the bottom of this clip, southeast of Florence. Most of the other towns are more-or-less in the right orientation to one another:

pic of medieval road map
Detail of a map from a medieval astronomy manuscript. The points show towns in France, Germany, Bohemia, Italy (along with Sicily, Sardinia, and Mallorca), Tunisia and, at the bottom of the folio… the Levant, and Greece. [BAV Pal.lat.1368, c. 1425]

Below Sicily and Rome, there is a gap. At the bottom is a muddled collection of points vaguely describing Greece, Egypt, the Levant, and “Babilonia Nova” (New Babylon). If you’re wondering where New Babylon is, it’s near the mouth of the Nile (old Babylon was southwest of Baghdad; on medieval mappa mundi, it was usually close to Jerusalem at the center).

On the left are some faint marks that look like roads or coastlines, perhaps the first attempt to create a more conventional map. Whether the final map that we see was considered finished (or “good enough”) we’ll probably never know, but it demonstrates that not all maps followed traditional styles.

Itinerary Maps that Focus on Visuals

Illustrated maps are usually more interesting than written instructions, and there was a significant one passed down to us by Giraldus de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis), a cleric of Welsh-Norman ancestry. He created or commissioned a map c. 1200 that is sandwiched between his two books on Ireland.

The map seems strange at first. The land masses are blobby, and the top is approximately southeast. Hibernia (Ireland) is at the bottom, but appears too far north of England. Germany and France have been collapsed to a fraction of their size, and the proximity of Iceland to Scandinavia is more sociopolitical than longitudinal.

Right away one can sense similarities to the itinerary map above in terms of geographical compromises. In fact, the orientation of the map shifts as one follows the various routes from Ireland to Rome:

Map attributed to Gerald de Barri of Pembrokeshire, Wales


Strip Maps

A strip map falls somewhere between a geographical map and a written itinerary, but is even more schematic than the example posted above. One could call it a Point-A-to-Point-B-to-Point-C map.

A journey from north to south might be expressed in the shape of a snake or a circle so that it fits conveniently on a page. Sometimes the routes are even drawn as strips, like this map describing the road from Hereford to Leicester:

Detail of Hereford to Leicester strip map

The most charming and interesting strip maps are probably those of Matthew Paris (mid-13th c). They include some of the mythic and geographical quirks of mappa mundi, some of the instructional features of itinerary maps, with added storytelling elements about the journey and what might be seen along the way.

They are, in some ways, the medieval version of a pop-up book. Here, a little flap opens up to show Rome:

Detail of flap on 13th-century map by Matthew Paris.

A building is topped by a stork, another visited by a turtle. Note how the page is organized into vertical panels like the Leicester map:

Detail of Mathew Paris strip map showing plants and animals accompanying the buildings.
A 13th-century Matthew Paris road map arranged in strips, highlights major architectural landmarks and interesting animals and plants along the way. [Royal MS 14 C VII, British Library]

Assuming it’s a Map, Where Does the VMS Fit?

To me, the VMS feels much more like a strip map than a portolan or mappa mundi… but only part of it (the outer corners).

The possible nautical symbol in the upper-right corner isn’t enough to confirm it as a portolan. The stars in the upper-right, the T-in-O shape, and the symbol that resembles a sextant (bottom left), might exist for instructional purposes (imagine a father with child at his side pointing out the identity and purpose of individual features).

I’ve tried resolving the features to the bay of Baia and Nisida, the home of many craters, steam vents, and baths of the Pozzuoli complex, and it works quite well, but there’s still the question of the Ghibelline merlons.

A Less Literal Interpretation

In the previous blog, I suggested the map could be interpreted as a synthesis of two planes, an earthly plane and a spiritual/celestial plane, with medieval notions of the elements incorporated into the four corners of the earthly plane:

One possible interpretation of the VMS map as representing two planes

The pathways connecting the corner rota, and the geographical details along the paths, remind me of strip maps. The other portions remind me of medieval abstractions of the celestial sphere. If this is the correct interpretation, then the likelihood of a strip map diminishes, due to the paucity of “stops”

Patterns Among Rota

The central rotum has always looked to me like a spiritual center, which could be a temple or church (Jerusalem, Rome, a pagan temple, or basically any local spiritual hub), or a representation of “Sol”, Apollo or God. It could even represent heaven, or a return to Paradise, as the ultimate destination on the road of life.

If the “pipes” emanating from Rotum1 are like chimney pipes, channeling heat from a fire, and if Rotum1 represents an earthly location in tandem with the element fire, then maybe the “pipes” around the central rotum also represent heat/light/fire, as is common in medieval cosmological drawings.

The four middle rota, connected to the center, seem more abstract than the corner rota, with radiating lines that were often used to represent celestial objects or events in didactic medieval illustrations of the cosmos. This form of abstraction continued into the Renaissance, but was increasingly accompanied by naturalistic drawings:

A 16th-century interpretation of the fiery ascension of Elijah. Note the abstraction of the chariot wheels, rotum-like with radiating lines. [Image courtesy of The Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow]

Here’s an 18th-century interpretation of the idea of an earthly plane below and a celestial plane above:

Diagram of the heavens by Mallet, 1719

Note how the heavens are drawn within the frame of a hanging tapestry, as though enclosed within walls, with stone-like cloud textures around the edge (not dissimilar to the more abstract rota in the VMS).

The earthly plane is drawn like a late-medieval-style map (modern maps are more symbolic)—quite literal and terrain-oriented. The center of the celestial realm above emanates rays.

Even though this engraving came later than the VMS and is a different drawing style, the basic themes are surprisingly similar. Heaven and earth, two different planes, and even though the earthly sphere shows naturalistic terrain and may represent a real location, the intent is not to illustrate a physical journey, but to provide a mental map of where the world fits.

Summary

I want to believe that the VMS “map” represents real places, that it is a strip map representing a journey. I invested years searching for matching locations (and found a few that might be relevant that I haven’t even had time to blog about yet), but the more I study medieval culture, the more I suspect I might be wrong… the corner rosettes map so easily to the four elements, it’s possible that is all they are intended to be, without any particular dependence on real locations.

Even if the drawings are real locations, they don’t necessarily have to be geographically related—the idea that they connect on the lower level (under the mid-folio rota) through pathways is speculation, in which case it isn’t really a map in the geographical sense, it might be more of a teaching map to explain medieval cosmology, with a few well-known or generic locations delightfully illustrated in the corners.

If I find out otherwise, I’ll post about it. I have mountains of information about possible geographical interpretations burning a hole in my hard drive and it would be a shame for them to go to waste. If the VMS turns out to be information deliberately obscured, maybe there’s still hope of decoding the text and understanding the “map” on its own terms.

J.K. Petersen

©Copyright 2019 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved


Light on the Subject

23 March 2019

I have several ideas for how the middle-right rotum on the VMS “map” could be interpreted, so this is just one possibility. I’ve mentioned it a few times on blogs and on the Voynich.ninja forum, but I thought it might be better to post some visuals.


Rotum 6 is ringed by a textured pattern of small circles painted blue. On the left is a different pattern of lines connecting it to the center rotum.

Within the outer blue texture is a double-infurled scalloped pattern resembling a cloudband. In the center is a small circle with a dot (the dot is the compass point) surrounded by another circle of small scaly shapes. From the inner circle emanate two roughly triangular spreading shapes (or perhaps they are pointing to the inner circle). The open portion between the scalloped band and the inner section is dotted with blue paint:

The first time I saw this, I thought it looked like water and rocks, similar to some of the other rota, but the infurled cloudband-shape makes me wonder whether the intention is mythical or real.

Does the double-infurled band indicate another realm or another time period? Could the band be “air”, as in some medieval depictions of the elements? Or could it be sea foam drawn with an infurled band simply because it was a popular theme at the time and they look somewhat the same?

I can’t cover all the possibilities in one blog, so let’s start with one of the more literal interpretations. For the sake of exploration, let’s assume this is something real with water and rocks. One idea I had is an aerial view of a lighthouse.

Medieval Lighthouses

Most medieval lighthouses have been rebuilt. The few that remain in their original form have been fitted with modern beacons and sound systems to replace the fire beacons and manual horns that were used in the Middle Ages. Sometimes they have been made taller. Nevertheless, we can get a sense of how they might have looked from these images:

Small sample of ancient and medieval lighthouses

Ancient lighthouses may have been more squarish or perhaps a combination of squared and round shapes. Many of the medieval lighthouses were round or somewhat round (octagonal) and when they were built on artificial jetties, those were sometimes round, as well.

What about the “Beams”?

Looking at the central circle in Rotum6, it looks like something is streaming out of it or pointing toward it at the top and bottom. Also, if you look closely, you will see small tickmarks on the lower left. The infurled, scalloped shape that resembles a cloudband might indicate another realm, or it could be foam where waves lap up against rocks:

VMS Rotum 6 possible interpretation of lines

Were light and sound represented with streamers and little tickmarks in the Middle Ages? I wasn’t sure, so I checked, and found that they were:

Examples of tick marks in medieval iconography

This doesn’t prove that the VMS lines mean light and sound, but it does show that it’s possible.

I wasn’t sure whether to include this image, as I’m not certain represents sound, but the way it’s coming out of textured bands at the top of the panel reminded me of the bird on VMS folio 86v that I blogged about here. The orientation is different, but the lofty position and the narrative impression are similar:

Bird in cloudband with lines emanating from its mouth.

This image from Giovaninno Di Grassi, with rays coming out of the cloudband, also reminded me of the tor with the birds on VMS f86v:

Di Grassi cloudband and eagles on high tor

So, let’s take a look at the evolution of this style of infurled band

The Infurled, Scalloped Band

Double Scallop from a c. 1480s German antiphony.

This infurled cloudlike shape was often used as a divider between the earthly and spiritual/heavenly realms. The scalloped edges were a later medieval style that evolved from simpler wavy shapes. Here is one of my favorite early-medieval cloudlike dividers with simpler bands (Tiberius C-VI):

Simple wavy-line cloudband in early medieval manuscript Tiberius C VI

These are some of the innovations that came later that are similar to the VMS band:

Some examples of infurled bands with scallped edges

The earliest of these examples, the 13th-century Louis Blanche band, wasn’t infurled, but it did have scalloped edges.

The scalloped infurled bands were quite common by the 15th century—I have far more examples than I can post. One influence may have been an Anglo-Norman tapestry of the New Jerusalem, woven in the late 14th century. Unlike the contents of books, tapestries were often on display, as signs of wealth, where more people could see them:

New Jerusalem tapestry, c. 1380

Another influence might be the design exemplar created by Giovannino di Grassi. You may have noticed that the illustration of the raptors on the tor above includes infurled shapes with scalloped edges. Di Grassi drew the image in his model book in the late 14th century, to provide examples for other illustrators.

Variations

The Rotum6 band is a single row, but sometimes there are multiple rows of bands, with rays and sound-horns coming out of them. This occurs in both Latin and Hebrew texts:

Multi-row infurls with rays and horns

In contrast to infurled bands, here is one comprised of spiral shapes from eastern Europe (probably Bohemia) that is more similar to Asian cloud clusters than the scalloped bands shown above (Velislavova Bible, c. mid-1400s):

The Lauber workshop, not surprisingly, created quickie versions of the western style of scallop:

Lauber workshop infurled scalloped bands

This form of scallop was later repeated in a printed version of De Sphaera.

This super-quickie version, without the scalloped edges, appears in NYPL ma 104 (c. 1445). The drawing style of the figures is not too different from the VMS, but more care and attention was given to VMS decorative elements and textures:

NYPL ma 104 simple infurled cloudband.

The motif remained even after printed books displaced hand-drawn illuminations. A mappa mundi created by Hanns Rüst, published in Augsburg c. 1480, includes infurled bands, and a small inverted-T-O in the bottom-right corner:

Double-scalloped band around an inverted T-O representation of the world in three parts.
PML 19921, Morgan Library & Museum, Pubished in Augsburg, c. 1480

On the same page, in the lower-left is a similar image, except it is arranged in bands rather than as a tripartate scheme, and thus the infurled shape is repeated as a representation of “air” within this schema, above horizontal bands of water, earth, and fire:

Horizontal scheme of the elements in c. 1480 medieval map

Thus, it can be seen that the infurled band was most popular in the late 14th century and the 15th century, consistent with the radiocarbon dating, and everything I’ve discovered so far about the paleographic characteristics of the manuscript.

But what does it mean in the VMS? Is it decorative or symbolic? If it’s symbolic, is it representative of another realm, or perhaps the element air? Or is it stylized sea foam around the base of a lighthouse?

Maybe the Answer is Simpler

Maybe Rotum6 is not a lighthouse, even though a lighthouse would fit well with the other water and rock/mountain imagery on the VMS “map”. Maybe it’s something more simple or more abstract.

Coming back to examples from Cotton Tiberius C VI, it can be seen that biblical stores often include beams of light, horns, and other iconography that represent the light of God, the majesty or power of God, or the voice of God (or one of his emissaries), emanating from a heavenly-realm band:

Infurled bands can also be found in stories of creation, as in this Anglo-Normal Bible (BL Additional 47682, 1330s):

Notice that the centers are rather abstract. You wouldn’t know what they represent without context (which may also be true of the four mid-side rota in the VMS “map”).

There is a more intricate version of the band in Egerton 1894 (c. 1360s), with God creating the animals (note also the rainbow):

Sometimes the story of creation gets all bundled up with Eden, animals, elements, winds, angels, the sound/word of God, and an extra scalloped band for good measure:

So this infurled style of band is frequently used to represent a division between realms (usually heaven and earth), but it can also represent “air”.

Could there be two different “planes” of meaning on the VMS “map” folio?

The VMS “Map” Seen as Layers

Perhaps the central rosette is a spiritual center (a church or temple, or Jerusalem, Eden, or Rome), and the four radiating “mouths” are the winds, connecting it to four rota on the middle-sides. There’s a certain consistency of theme among these. Each one has lines radiating from the center toward the edges (in Rotum6 there are only two rather than multiple spokes). Each one is explicitly connected to the central, larger rotum:

VMS central rotum and four connected rota

The four rota in the corners are drawn and connected in a different way from those on the sides—they are also more literal and detailed in a geographical sense. They are not directly connected to the center, like the side rota. Instead, they have “pathways” that connect around the edges of the folio.

Maybe these paths don’t go through the four side-middle groups as it appears at first glance… maybe they connect directly to the other corners on another plane. We might be looking at a spiritual plane and an earthly plane:

VMS "map" corner rota


Even though the corners do not connect directly to the center (just as earth does not directly connect to heaven), they do in a sense “point” to the center using protruberances such as pipes and mounds. Each corner rotum has a certain amount of terrain or context extending into the space outside the edges (suns, symbols, textures).

There are two pathways extending from the sides of the corner rota, but each is a slightly different design. And each rotum has a different inner design (oval, spiral, terrain-like, garden-like).

One way to look at this is that the outer corners may represent the earthly plane, and thus embody (from the top-right going clockwise), the elements of water, air, earth, and fire, and still (at the same time) represent real locations, but before this idea is discussed in depth, I have some information on mapping traditions I’d like to post first.

Sorry for the abrupt interruption, but this was originally a small portion of a very long blog that goes into detail on whether the VMS “map” is traditional, metaphorical, or literal. It was much too long for one post, so I split it in two. I will post the rest of it as soon as I can figure out how to break up the remaining portion into two, as well, as it is also much too long.

To be continued…

J.K. Petersen

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