The VMS Portal

I have an overfull schedule that makes it difficult for me to blog regularly, but the subject of apocalyptic cartography came up on the forum today and reminded me of some thoughts I had about the Voynich “map” section.

I first set eyes on the rosettes page in the Voynich Manuscript in 2008* and immediately had several thoughts about it, including the impression that it might be a map (obviously this has occurred to many people but up to that point the only opinions on the VMS I had seen were Edith Sherwood’s plant identifications).

I started with the top-left rosette and expended a lot of energy following up ideas that came to mind from this one rosette alone. Unfortunately, most of this research was done very late at night, after a 12 to 14-hour workday,  which means the notes only make sense to me, and are not suitable for general consumption and I still don’t have time to whip them into human-readable form (hopefully I can do so one of these days). Now I’m shocked to see that 8 years have gone by and I still don’t have time to post them.

So… since ideas have a way of going stale if you hang on to them for too long, I decided to summarize my first impressions, in case they are of interest to fellow Voynicheros. I haven’t looked to see if any of these ideas were original when I first had them (or if any are still original now). I simply have given up hoping for more free time and, for what it’s worth… decided to share them. These were my thoughts on first seeing the VMS “map” and Rosette 1 (top left).

• I thought it might be a volcano (the wiggly lines in the middle looked like flames to me and probably did to other people, as well).
• I thought it might be the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (I considered the possibility of the illustrator documenting a crusade, but try as I might, I couldn’t reconcile the individual parts to Jerusalem—they  don’t fit quite well enough to pass the sniff test, even if some of the tombs at the time looked a bit like the tower coming out of the hole).
• That it might be a coliseum and the mounts might be the hills of Rome (coliseums were sometimes flooded for water sports and, if games continued into dark, may have had torches lining the arena and there’s a she-wolf teats-like picture in the bathing section).
• That it might be a “portal” to another world and, since those look like flames around the inner edges, perhaps it was meant to be a portal to hell or something along those lines (which is why the apocalyptic cartography thread twigged my memory).

I’m going to have to win a lottery to make enough free time to whip my hundreds of pages of notes into shape, and since that’s not likely to happen in the near (or distant) future, I finally decided to post these ideas as food for thought.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2016 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Postscript, correction: I was going by memory when I wrote the above date of 2008. In looking back at my files, it turns out I first began studying the VMS map in spring 2007 (that’s when I created a directory and started collecting and studying medieval maps).