Category Archives: The Voynich Large Plants

Investigation of the large Voynich plant images.

Who Copied the Voynich Manuscript?

28 April 2021

More than five years, ago Fabrizio Salani purchased a drawing at a second-hand market in Italy that resembles a copy of a VMS plant, folio 14v. Rene Zandbergen provided a link to the drawing on the voynich.ninja forum. Unfortunately, the link is no longer active, but Salani later posted an interesting video about his discovery on youtube that is still available.

Deja Vu

When I saw the drawing, I immediately noticed something familiar, something I had noticed while cruising through plant drawings, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. From that moment on, I was intrigued by the possibility of finding the illustrator and, after an extensive survey of medieval, Renaissance, and modern plant books, I located examples that have the same idiosyncrasies as the drawing purchased by Salani.

The Long Road Forward

The only reason it was possible to find the Salani illustrator is because he substituted his own style of root for the VMS root. The VMS drawing (right) has a crab-like root, painted a dark brick-red). The Salani root is more naturalistic. He also added an extra leaf which has some distinctive properties.

At the time we were alerted to the Salani drawing, I posted a few examples of roots on the voynich.ninja forum (02/12/16). I knew they were not the same illustrator, but I had a feeling they they might be approximately the same time period. I did not restrict my search to this period of history, however, but several years of research brought me back to it, time and time again, and it turned out to be the right ballpark.

The Salani drawing is not a slavish copy of the VMS plant, but it’s faithful enough that it cannot be a coincidence. Assuming the Salani illustrator copied the VMS (or copied a copy of the VMS) and not the other way around (which seems unlikely), he apparently did not think a 100% faithful copy was needed for whatever purpose he made the copy.

Voynichese Characters

The VMS glyphs are not copied with complete accuracy either. They are mostly right, and even the way they cross the leaf has been honored, but there are some small discrepancies.

Guessing at the purpose of the copy is difficult, but my research on printing history revealed that Renaissance entrepreneurs scrambled to gather up manuscripts that they could turn into printed books. Perhaps there was a period in the life of the VMS when someone thought it might be worthy of print reproduction. If so, this may have occurred during the “dark” portion of the VMS provenance.

Another possibility is that the copy represents one of the events documented in letters about the VMS between the Jesuits who had it in their possession before Wilfrid Voynich acquired it. There is mention of a copy (the current owner apparently didn’t want to give up the whole manuscript). I will discuss this in future posts because this is only valid if the active life of the illustrator synchs up with the dates of the letters.

Summary

I will share more about this intriguing discovery in future blogs, but for now, here is a small portion of a chart I created as I was searching for the illustrator and, more importantly searching for corroborating evidence to pinpoint the dates during which he was active and who he associated with at the time.

Chart Documenting Illustrator for Fabrizio Salani drawing
J.K. Petersen chart documenting connections to the illustrator who apparently created the Fabrizio Salani drawing

I will post close-ups at a future date (this is a teaser since it’s not possible to explain the whole chart without close-ups that show the connections).

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright April 2021 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

An Enciphered Herbal

22 September 2020

A few years ago I noticed something was going on with the plant names in Codex LJS 419, but I was busy with other research, so I bookmarked it for future reference. In March 2020, with most of the world in quarantine, I finally had a few minutes to leaf through the scans and realized, when I saw the peony plant, that the labels had been lightly enciphered.

A Plant Book that Spanned a Century

According to the U. Penn Schoenberg Collection Subject Details, the LJS 419 Erbario was begun in the first half of the 15th century with a number of later additions. The drawings are quite good for 15th century. Some are stylized, but most are recognizable.

UPenn Schoenberg Collection LJS 419 is a bit of a pastiche. The drawings are in at least three different styles, and the ones on the recto (the original drawings) are frequently smaller than the ones they face.

There are labels by most of the drawings, and text under some of the images in handwriting that was common to the 16th century. Thus, the text may have been added as much as a century after the drawings.

I noticed that some of the labels are incorrect. The plant below is clearly not Calendula, a plant that has had the same name for centuries. It is recognizable as Senecio, probably Senecio vulgaris:

LJS 419 drawing incorrectly labeled as Calendula.

The labels for Pulmonaria (65v) and Salvia (65r) don’t match the plant drawings either, but if you swap the labels, then they match (a detail that the Shoenberg commentator didn’t note in the annotations for each plant).

Most of the labels appear to be correct, however, and they are interesting because some of them are in cipher…

The Garbled Plant Labels

Some of the plant names are readable. Others are oddly spelled and overwritten, like this one:

LJS 419 Latucha changed plant label

The word “Latuca” is somewhat mangled. Adding a stem to each “a” makes it Lbtucb. The next word, “agrestis” has a stem through the “e” to make it “f”, and the “i” is “l”.

I wasn’t sure what was happening until I saw an odd label next to a plant that was easy to identify. That’s when I realized this was a simple cipher with some of the vowels changed.

Here is the label. It reads pepnla:

I could see this was a Peony plant not a “Pepnla” plant which, in turn, made it clear that this was a partial substitution cipher. It is sometimes called the monk’s cipher and I can see why. I have often seen it in manuscripts with ecclesiastical content, like sermons.

Notice how the “o” is “p” (I saw the same substitution in some of the earlier plant labels), and the “i” is changed to “l” (ell). That was the clue. It’s a common and simple vowel-substitution cipher that is quite easy to read once you get used to the fact that consonants are used for vowels:

  • The “o” is changed to “p” because it is a vowel and “p” is the closest consonant following “o”.
  • The “i” has been changed to “l” because it is the closest consonant following “i”. They didn’t have “j” in the Middle Ages (what looks like “j” was usually an embellished “i”) and many languages did not have “k”, so “l” (ell) would be the closest consonant following “i”.

I’m not sure why they left the first “e” and last “a” as vowels rather than substituting all the vowels. Either it was an oversight, or perhaps they thought Pepnla was enough to obscure the name.

Here’s another example that reveals the order in which things were done for this label but apparently not for all the labels:

Underneath, it looks like Spftlnb, which is a little more difficult to read without decoding it first because it is both abbreviated and enciphered. Someone wrote over it with darker ink, to create S~pe’tina, which is an abbreviation for Serpentina. It uses the same system as the others, of selecting the next-closest consonant to replace the vowel.

Note how the “u” letters in the next two words were written as “x”, which is to be expected for a consonant following “u”. Many languages did not have the letter “w”, and “u” and “v” were roughly equivalent, so “x” is a natural substitute.

Sometimes plaintext is written over the ciphertext. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Perhaps there were three hands involved, one turning it into ciphertext, someone else converting it back.

Now that it was clear that a consistent system was used, it became straightforward to decipher the last word cpstb which was not overwritten. This can be deciphered as “costa”. Costa is a medicinal plant that was common in medieval herbals.

A plant drawing that clearly depicts Asphodel also has an altered label. It looks like this:

Here the ciphered text is Afpdklk, and we can see that the “o” was written as “p” (consistent with the previous examples). The two “i” characters in Afodili (one of the common spellings at the time) were written as “k”.

So the writer apparently did know the letter “k” (“k” was not used in every language but sometimes it was used in loanwords). The phrase following the name “herba di Sbtxrnp” is only partly enciphered. It decrypts to herba di Saturna.

The next label reads Bftpnlchb, which decrypts to Betonicha, another very common plant in medieval herbals:

The next one might have been harder to read without the picture, since it is both abbreviated and enciphered, but it includes a good drawing of the plant:

The word was overwritten as Tprmftlla, which decodes to Torme’tila, with the macron standing for the missing “n” in Tormentila.

The next one reads dltamp bla’chp, so the “a” was left in its normal state. The plaintext is ditamo biancho. Note the humanist-style “h”, which has a short stem that doesn’t quite reach the baseline. This, in addition to the overall style, is one of the palaeographic clues that the labels were probably added in the later 15th century or, more likely, the 16th century:

Male and Female Plants

The following label puzzled me for a moment. Since pepnkb isn’t a plant name, it has to be the enciphered word peonia. But it doesn’t look as much like a peony as the other drawing already mentioned. It is more upright, and drawn without the seeds. Then I remembered that some medieval manuscripts included both “male” and “female” (mascula, femina) versions of peony, just as they did for Mandrake and a few other plants. Since there is a very recognizable peony drawing on the verso, I’m guessing that it represents the female and the recto represents the male plant:

The next label reads Mprssus dkbbpli, which translates to Morssus diaboli (devil’s bite), a common name for several species of Scabious.

But the drawing is not a Scabious plant. Scabious has pufflike flowers, not bell-shaped flowers. The flower in the drawing is like Campanula, but the hairy stalk and parsley-like leaves are not, so it is probably Pulsatilla, the Pasque flower, rather than Scabious. Most Pulsatilla flowers do not dangle as much as this, they tend to spread their petals, like anemones, but they do sometimes hang, depending on the species. Taken together with the flower shape, leaves, and fibrous base, it’s probably Pulsatilla:

The next label is lxnbrkb, which is described as follows in the Schoenberg annotations for this manuscript:

66: ‘Lenbrkb’ – a puzzle, though the same word is used for a different plant on 71r

It’s really not that puzzling. This decrypts quite easily as “lunaria” by using vowel-for-consonant substitution:

Lunaria, enciphered plant label in LJS 419.

Compared to ciphers of today, or even of 200 years ago, this is easy to read. You don’t even have to make a chart, you just have to learn the letter that follows each vowel and you can read it as though it were normal text.

Other Interesting Details

A few of the drawings are unpainted and include color annotations, a detail that may also exist in the Voynich Mansucript:

LJS 419 unpainted plant drawings with color annotations

Why someone chose such light encipherment for plant names (and only enciphered a few of them) is difficult to understand. Maybe they did it for fun. Maybe they were planning something similar for the rest of the text but never completed the task. What it tells us, however, is that even in the 16th century, these very simple ciphers were still in use, and if you combine them with abbreviations, they can sometimes be a bit more challenging to figure out if there are no drawings to make the meaning clear.

Summary

I had planned to post this blog in April, but simply forgot about it. Then today, I saw the paper of Alisa Gladyseva on Researchgate.net where she describes the peony name in this manuscript as an example of a “corrupted” plant name.

I was quite stunned that someone who writes a paper on the history of cryptography and who claims to have decoded the VMS did not recognize the monk’s cipher (which is simple and only involves partial substitution of vowels) and so I decided to post this blog so the VMS community can compare her interpretation with what is really happening in LJS 419. Here is what Gladyseva wrote in her paper:

Obviously, some names of 13 plants [in MS Aldini 211] seem to be corruptions of known names e.g. ‘Antolla’ for ‘Anthyllis’, ‘Ariola’ for ‘Oriola’. 23 plant names are strongly corrupted for e.g. ‘Metries’ for ‘Myrtus’, ‘Rigogola’ for ‘Galega’….

Manuscript Number is ‘ljs419’ Italy, of XV century is a typical of the medieval Apuleius herbal. But it has corrupted botanical names of plant on 71r folia. As well as the name of plant ‘Pepeko’ 24r, that is probably is one of the species of peony in real. | P E O N I O |. In reason, on the next folia there is another kind of peony: 24v: ‘Peonia’. –Gladyseva, Jan 2020

So, Gladyseva includes a paragraph on corrupted plant names and then cites LJS 419 as an example of corrupted plant names, but it is not! It is an example of a common and very simple medieval substitution cipher, as can be seen by the decryption examples I posted above.

Gladyseva has been claiming for some time that she has deciphered the VMS, but never shows any concrete examples of her method. How could a researcher who claims to have deciphered the Voynich Manuscript in a paper that describes the history of cryptography have missed something so simple and obvious as the monk’s cipher?

I think it’s time for her to reveal her method so the rest of the research community can see if there is sufficient evidence to support her claims.

J.K. Petersen

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

Voynich Large Plants – Folio 46v

14 February 2020

This is one of the VMS plant IDs I left blank in 2013 because I simply couldn’t find an explanation for the root shape. The plant has always looked to me like Tanacetum (or maybe Achillea), but I wanted to figure out the root before posting and was never completely sure if it was an angel, a bird, or something else. Now I realize it might not matter… there might be enough references in the style of the flower to help us understand the meaning behind it.

But first, let’s look at the VMS drawing…

Plant 46v

VMS Plant 46v

Plant 46v is drawn toward the left of the page, as though space were left for more text that was never added. The text itself is a bit unusual. There is a right-side column that extends downwards and almost runs into the plant rather than following the shape of the plant. It looks like the text may have been added in two passes, a chunk on the left and a narrowing chunk on the right.

The drawing is fairly large and clipped at the bottom. The size of the flowerheads appears to be exaggerated (perhaps to show the details?). The stalk curls in a way that is not common to very many species—it might be mnemonic or stylized. A few of the individual stalks end abruptly, without flowers, an intriguing detail that might be important.

Coloration

The painting is rough, but the choice of colors indicates some thought. The stalk has clear green on the bottom, shading to a pale grayish-brown on the upper stalk, with blue on the individual flower stalks, and a darker blue for the calyx. The root is a medium brown with a light section where it connects to the stalk, and two red patches on either side.

The leaves are somewhat fernlike, with slight tails, and carefully drawn individual leaf serrations. The leaf stalks are concentrated at the base. On the leaves themselves, almost hidden by paint, are some lines that might represent hairs, veins, or ridges.

In fact, the whole drawing seems somewhat stylized (not just the root, but also the flower stalk and, to some extent, the leaves). To me, the root looks like an angel or maybe a bird and other researchers have suggested it might be a bird. What is provocative about it is the round circle in the “neck” and the red lining on the “shoulders”. These are not accidental details. The round part almost looks like an attachment point, as one might see in a tool or a piece of folding portable furniture.

When I look at the drawing from a distance, it reminds me of Tanacetum or Achillea. Both are in the aster family and have button-like flowers and serrated somewhat frondy leaves. The flower-heads and the serrated leaves in the VMS drawing seem consistent with these plants, but a Voynich researcher had another idea that I think has merit…

Prior IDs

I don’t agree with Edith Sherwood’s 2015 ID. She suggested Geum urbanum (wood avens), which is a plant in the rose family, but the flowers of G. urbanum are not the same shape as the VMS drawing. They have five petals that splay out (see below-right), and the flowerheads are more discrete, and they do not tend to cluster on the same stalk. The palmate leaves don’t match the VMS drawing very well either. She has an earlier ID (2008) suggesting a different plant (Inula conyza), which fits the drawing better, so I’m not sure why she changed the ID.

I think the button-like flowers in the VMS drawing look more like asters than roses, and the VMS leaves are clearly not palmate (there are other VMS drawings that have well-defined palmate leaves, so clearly the illustrator knew how to draw palmate leaves).

Other IDs

On the Voynich.ninja forum, Ellie Velinska mentioned costmary (Tanacetum balsamita). I like this ID. Costmary has finely serrated leaves and button-like flowers. I think Velinska mentioned a bird in the root, but I had been thinking it might be an angel. Either way, it looks more mnemonic than natural.

In Renaissance-era herbals I have noticed that costmary is sometimes listed under the older name of Chrysanthemum balsamita. Costmary is the Bible-leaf plant (the fragrant leaves are dried and used as bookmarks), and the French name for costmary is Herbe Sainte-Marie (referring sometimes to Mary Magdalene, other times to Mary, mother of Jesus). It was used medicinally in the Middle Ages, and also as a flavoring (hence the alternate name ale-cost).

Velinska’s ID of costmary fits well in almost every way. I wanted to endorse it, but there is one troubling detail…

Costmary is an eastern plant. It is common in Asia but was not introduced to Europe until about the 16th century. It did exist in a few places in the Caucasus, but may not have been abundant, as there were other more common species of Tanacetum that grew in this region, and plants are always competing for habitat. So I tried to find costmary in medieval herbals to see if I could support Velinska’s idea, but found it difficult to find any examples. Those that most resemble it are probably sage, but for the record, here is what I found…

Tracking Down St. Mary

There are many plants called Sancte Maria/Santa Maria (including Dysphania ambrosioides, Solomon’s seal, and some species of Thymus) and the Linnaean system didn’t exist yet to help distinguish them. Most of the medieval drawinngs labeled Santa Maria show forget-me-nots or Solomon’s seal, or do not include flowers (which usually means the flowers are not a prevalent or useful part of the plant).

In medieval herbals, drawings labeled Santa Maria tend to depict leafy plants (which, unfortunately, are very numerous and hard to distinguish from each other), but it’s possible some of them are sage (Salvia), which is often drawn without flowers and called Santa Maria.

Comparison of a leafy medieval plant called Santa Maria with a botanical drawing of sage.
It’s possible this leafy plant, which is labeled Sancte Maria, is one of the common species of sage. The flowers were generally not included in the drawings, which makes it difficult to make a definitive identification, especially when there were several different plants with this name, but if it is sage, then the dog-muzzle style flowers would not be a good match for a VMS costmary ID.

There are numerous plants in medieval herbals with flowers that are similar to the VMS 46v. Feverfew, chamomile, and Tanacetum vulgare are common, but they are usually labeled in a way that they can be recognized and I have not found one that can be unambiguously pinpointed as Tanacetum balsamita.

A New Drawing of Santa Maria

medieval plant drawing labeled Santa maria
Santa Maria, BNF Lat 17848, c. 1440s

Then, while looking through my copious files on medieval plants, I noticed that around the middle of the 15th century, a new drawing labeled Santa Maria shows up in a number of herbals. I couldn’t find it in the older references. Could this be costmary?

Unfortunately, the drawing doesn’t look like costmary, which is an aster. The mystery plant has a single long stalk with flame-like flowers (other versions of the drawing also have orange or red flame-like flowers). It looks more like Gladiolus or Salvia than costmary, so if it is costmary, it’s quite a bad drawing, even compared to other medieval drawings, and since most of the herbals have reasonably accurate drawings of tansy and feverfew (which are similar to costmary). I’m inclined to think the drawing on the right is not costmary, but maybe one of the red salvias.

Other Possibilities

The Tanacetum plants, in general, are a good match for VMS 46v. Many of them have frond-like sawtooth leaves and button-like flowers and, as mentioned, similar plants like tansy and feverfew are commonly found in medieval herbals. For the VMS plant, I was leaning more toward tansy than feverfew, but there are some varieties of feverfew that have shorter-than-usual petals and button-like centers, so it cannot be entirely eliminated.

I’m tempted to include Arabis collina on the list of possibilities. The leaves are a good match and the flower-stalk curls, but unfortunately, the flowers are wrong:

There is another species to consider. Achillea (also known as yarrow) has clusters of button-like flowers and finely serrated or frond-like leaves (depending on the species). It is widely distributed across Asia and Europe, and has much in common with the VMS drawing.

Achillea comes in several colors, including pink and red, but most varieties are yellow or creamy white. On some species, the flowers are like tansy, other times they are like chamomile. The leaves are sometimes feathery, sometimes more solid, and there are even woolly varieties. This plant is often included in medieval herbals under the name Millefolium:

Botanical illustration Achillea millefolium yellow.

Cotula is another possibiity. It has button flowers (there are quite a lot of asters with button flowers, sometimes called “rayless asters”), but the leaves are typically slender and smooth-margined, so the leaves are not a good match. Acamptopappus species also have button flowers, but it’s a desert plant (and American in origin), and the leaves are quite slender and small.

So I am still uncertain about the identity of 46v, if examined from a naturalistic point of view, and even thought costmary might not have been known in Europe in the early 15th century, it’s still one of my favorite IDs because the idea of an angel in the root would fit well with the name. A bird would too, if we are thinking in terms of Mary’s ascension and bird-drawings of the Holy Spirit.

But what about the curled stalk?

This is a question I’ve been wrestling with for some time, and another reason it has taken so long to post this blog. Is the curled stalk a characteristic of the plant, or is it a decorative embellishment?

There are plants with curled stalks (Arabis, Heliotrope and many others), but they don’t usually have rayless flowers, and the stalk on the right of the VMS drawing has exactly seven flowers (a number important to medieval society).

I’m leaning toward 46v being a stylized drawing, especially when I see decorative floral elements in manuscripts such as the ones below (I have flipped them so they face the same way as the VMS flower). In terms of iconography, take note of the clipped stalks:

VMS 46v flower stalk compared with examples of decorative floral motifs in the Luttrell Psalter
Top-left, VMS 46v. Top-right and bottom, decorative aster-like floral motifs from the Gorleston Psalter.

A Connection to Medieval Cosmology?

I kept wondering why the VMS illustrator spun the flower stalk in a loop and put seven flowers on the right stalk and one on the left. I knew it was common for medieval and post-medieval emblems to include seven stars representing the “seven planets”. In medieval cosmology, the earth was the center of the universe, orbited by seven “stars”.

Does the flower on the left represent the earth, and the seven flowerheads on the right the seven “stars” (or “planets” as they were conceived at the time), which were defined as Moon, Mercury, Lucifer/Veneris, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn?

Liber Floridus medieval cosmology
The seven “planets” from a medieval point of view as depicted in Liber Floridus as Sun, Moon, Mercury, Lucifer (Veneris), Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These were all considered to be revolving around the Earth.

Here is a later example from Anatomia Auri (early 17th century) that I wanted to include because it combines medicine, astrology, cosmology, and alchemy. This astrological diagram focuses on Leo as the sun sign (notice the sign for Leo in the center by each of the sun’s cheeks) and, like earlier medieval drawings, shows the six other “planets” together with the sun:

Anatomia Auria Leo astrological symbol ringed by "planets".

Why did I pick this one from the early 17th century rather than one from the 15th century? Because the Leo sign by the sun’s cheeks reminded me of this diagram on VMS 28v, which was discussed extensively by K. Gheuens and others on the Voynich.ninja forum due to the emblematic shape and the mysterious figures in the center.

I think the writing in the center could be interpreted in several different ways, possibly the way Gheuens suggested, but one of the ideas that crossed my mind was that the portion on the right might be an upside-down Leo symbol, similar to those on the cheeks of the sun-sign in the diagram above.

VMS plant 28v rayed plant with letters inside

But getting back to Plant 46v, is it possible the flowers represent the earth on the left and seven “planets” on the right in the medieval earth-centric universe? Or is it something else?

In Kabbalah, the number one is the source, origin; seven is family, harmony, which might fit with an angel-root, but less so with a bird.

If the root is an angel, then perhaps the flowers on the right represent the angels of the seven churches, which are depicted here with each one holding a star:

The angels of the seven churches, standing on a cloudband, each one holding a star. Sometimes a key of Solomon is drawn along with the seven angels, and the stars are sometimes likened to the seven medieval “planets”. [Source: BNF Français 13096]

Sometimes the seven stars of the seven churches are shown on one side, with the key of Solomon on the other:

BL Add 15243 key of Solomon and the seven stars of the seven churches.
The key of Solomon, with Latinized initials for Alpha and Omega? on either side of the nimbed God. The seven stars represent the seven churches and may also refer to the seven “planets”. [Source: BL Add 15243]

Unfortunately, it’s hard to narrow down a specific analogy because symbols of 1 + 7 are rather common. It might be a mnemonic for stars, such as the Pleiades (the seven sisters) and their father Atlas. The Pleiades are roughly arranged in an arc, with their father to one side:

Star chart of Pleiades (the seven sisters) and their father Atlas.

Or there might be a religious analogy…

There is an image of the Virgin and child in the Pauper’s Bible that places the Virgin in the center of spiraling rings of water (the fountain or “font” analogy was adapted from water imagery in Pagan times).

You might wonder what this enigmatic drawing means (especially when one sees spiral images and a lot of water in the VMS, as well). It’s a mnemonic, in the Llullian tradition, representing a prayer that was widely included in Books of Hours. The fountains spiraling between Mary and the outer edge are invocations to the Virgin, representing her as the “fount” of mercy, grace, consolation, indulgence, etc.:

A mnemonic for a prayer common in Books of Hours that includes an invocation to the Virgin Mary [Source: Pauper’s Bible, BSB Clm 8201 1414/1415].

Thus, we see a focal point (Virgin and child) with seven comet-like “fonts” (funds, or fountains) in a spiral. It doesn’t look like the VMS plant, but the themes and elements are similar.

The Pauper’s Bible also has a large number of candlestick-like plant images, similar to those I mentioned in a previous post about The Desert of Religion and similar to those by Ramon Llull, as in this one enumerating key points of the philosophy of love:

Tree of the Philosophy of Love, Ramon Lull, c. 13th century [This version from the Biblioteca Diocesana de Mallorca]

Here are similar plant forms in the Pauper’s Bible that are used to express religious categorizations, concepts, and sometimes mnemonics:

Plant-like instructional drawings in the 1414/1415 Pauper's Bible from Bavaria.

Some of the VMS plants also have candelabra-like qualities, but they do not have labels on the leaves, so it’s difficult to know if they have a similar purpose.

In alchemical diagrams, an assumed relationship between astrology, the seven “planets”, plants, and candlesticks (a metaphor variously used for religion, heat, or light) and chemical processes (especially those of distillation) are frequently diagramed in a highly symbolic way, as in this example from Anatomia Auri:

Anatomia Auri symbolic diagram of the orobouros, plants, stars, eage, sun and moon.

Summary

I think two things are especially important to consider about VMS Plant 46v…

  • The first is the apparently symbolic root, and the spiraling, broken-off flower stalks. They are more decorative or mnemonic than naturalistic. Viny plants are common in the borders of medieval manuscripts, but my research so far indicates this style (with the spiral stalks with a few broken off) was especially prevalent in English/Northern French manuscripts of the 13th to 15th centuries. But unlike the VMS drawing, the manuscript flower stalks were mostly decorations and a single plant did not usually occupy a full page.
  • The second is to note that the drawing in the Pauper’s Bible is specifically mnemonic, in a way that was probably inspired by the works of Ramon Llull or one of his followers. It is designed to inform and to remind.

It’s easy to consider the root as symbolic, but perhaps the VMS flower is symbolic as well. Maybe the text that accompanies this specific drawing is not about plants. Maybe it is a description of a constellation (like Pleiades). Maybe the root is an eagle and the drawing is about alchemy. Or maybe Plant 46v represents a prayer and there is an angel in the root.

J.K. Petersen


Postscript: After posting a blog, I always notice a few hours later that I’ve forgotten something I intended to include.

This time, I left out the explanation for the oddities at the base of the plant stalk if the plant combines symbols from Christianity and alchemy. The eagle is a prevalent theme in alchemical diagrams and birds frequently represent ascension and the holy spirit in Christian imagery. So…

If 46v represents alchemical or Christian themes (or both), then the red shoulder and the odd round circle at the base of the stalk might be the blood of Christ (wine is a fermented product) and the “host” (the body of Christ as per Catholic tradition). In addition to possibly representing the “host”, the “o” might also double for the hole driven through Christ’s feet and hands at the crucifixion. I have sometimes seen this represented in medieval drawings as a simple “o”-shape.

Or perhaps it’s a symbolic representation of the philosopher’s stone (which was sometimes drawn in the claw of the alchemical eagle) or the pelican piercing its breast to feed its young (one of the common alchemical distillation jars was called a pelican jar due to the curved shape of the glass pipes that fed back into the main jar). In medieval illustrations, the pelican never looked like a real pelican, it was always drawn like a songbird or a small crane.

© Copyright J.K. Petersen Feb. 2020, 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

Dragon Tails

4 July 2019

Medieval manuscripts with herbs are sometimes embellished with images of dogs, snakes, and dragons, often because the plant is used as a remedy for bites, or because it is named after an animal (e.g., dog violet, dragon’s blood). In this blog we’ll look at animal imagery that accompanies a specific plant.

Aristolochia rotunda botanical drawing by Elizabeth Blackwell

For this example, I selected Aristolochia, a popular medicinal plant native to the Mediterranean.

Aristolochia exemplifies some of the differences in illustrative styles between 1) northern Italian and French manuscripts, 2) branches that include French, Italian, and German manuscripts, and 3) a separate branch comprised mainly of English manuscripts. Plus, it was often drawn with a dragon by the root or, occasionally, a snake, which provides additional information on lineage.

Overview of Herbal Traditions

Most diagrams of herbal illustrative traditions are of this form:

This kind of chart is helpful for an overview of illustrative descent, but it doesn’t help one to see or compare the drawings. So I created a new kind of chart…

I organized the information so that each dot on the chart is replaced with an image of the plant. I can choose any plant in any manuscript that is included in the files and, in a few seconds, display the relationships among them (this is the result of more than 11 years of comparison, classification, and identification of medieval plant drawings and is still ongoing).

The chart below is a small corner of a very large diagram that compares more than 75 herbal manuscripts from the 6th century to the 16th century (there are also sources from the 17th century, but I have not included them in this VMS-related discussion).

For this example, the English manuscripts are not visible in the first excerpt (they are off to the right), as they form yet another distinctively recognizable group. Aristolochia is not native to the United Kingdom, but it is interesting that it appeared in English manuscripts from about the 11th century onward, usually in a viny style with a round or spindly root.

Harley 4986 stands out from the more typical English manuscripts because Aristolochia longa was drawn with a round root. It may have been mistaken for another plant (it is labeled Aristocia longa but looks like a drawing of Cyclamen).

The Process of Identification

I had some background in plants before I learned about the VMS, and I should point out that visual similarity was not the only criterion for organizing these images. The names of the plants and their spellings often help to confirm the pictorial features, together with the order in which the plants are represented (sometimes even the page numbers match). I consulted textual herbals, as well (those without diagrams). All these flagposts were taken into consideration. There may still be small details to adjust but, for the most part, I believe the IDs to be good.

I’ve simplified the layout for blog display by taking out the relationship arrows. Organizing the chart with thumbnails for each plant makes it easier to compare and contrast the drawings. The dates in this example are approximate (I also have a version that more accurately shows date ranges and their level of confidence, but a ballpark is good enough for a blog post).

Smearwort

Aristolochia rotunda was known as “smearwort” due to its perceived medicinal value, or “round-rooted birthwort” (Aristolochia longa is a related plant known as birthwort).

In the following illustrations, note the arrangement of the leaves, the distinctively different ways of drawing the root, and the presence or absence of the dragon (in conjunction with the root style):

Three distinct styles of drawing the aristolochia root in medieval botanical drawings.

There are also a few drawings that fall in between the vague root and the round one but, in general, most are obvious copies of their predecessors.

The Lumpy Root

In the following group of manuscripts, the A. rotunda root is drawn like a sack of marbles, with an accompanying dragon, while the roots in the second chart farther below look like vague lumps or puzzle pieces and do not include the dragon (in other words, the dragon only occurs in drawings with a specific and distinctive style of root drawing).

Note also that in the drawings on the bottom-right (Udine and Vermont herbals) the leaves are different (smaller and more viny), and the dragon or serpent is posed differently:

Medieval examples of Aristolochia rotunda

The similarities between Masson 116, Historia Plantarum, Erbario 106, Sloane 4016, CLM 2853, and Canon Misc 408 are very obvious. The arrangement of the leaves and the pose of the dragon are unmistakable. Even the pretzel curl in the dragon’s tail has been copied.

Note however, that the distinctive wings of the dragon are not present in the Erbario and Canon Misc drawings. It’s a small difference but an important one that strengthens the possible connection between Canon Misc 408 and Erbario 106.

The CLM 28531 image is hard to see, but the dragon has wings, so it is more similar to Masson 116 than to Erbario 106 or Canon Misc.

BnF Lat 17844 is of particular interest as it faithfully copies the leaf shapes and arrangement seen in the Masson/Historia Plantarum/Erbario group, and the marble-sack root, but includes small changes to the dragon’s head and tail (it is looped, but not in a pretzel). Thus it is unlikely that BnF Latin 17844 influenced Misc 408 or CLM 28531.

Note that I have color-coded some of the manuscripts, and there are two color-codes around the borders of Erbario 106 and Canon Misc 408. This is because I discovered there were images from more than one tradition in these manuscripts. This demonstrates that not all manuscripts are copied from a single source or, in some cases, that two or more herbals have been bound together.

So far, I haven’t found any Aristolochia marble-sack roots with dragons prior to the 14th century. Masson 116 appears to be the earliest (in manuscripts viewable online). Historia Plantarum includes essentially the same drawing and was created close in time to Masson 116. Even the dragon’s wavy out-pointed ears are present:

Aristolochia rotunda roots with dragons in medieval herbal manuscripts

Scholars are still debating whether the original source for the later manuscripts was Masson 116 or some other exemplar.

Mixed Sources? Or a coincidence?

The relationship between the Masson/Historia Plantarum/Sloane manuscripts and the Udine/Vermont herbals is very intriguing. The leaves in the latter two are smaller and vinier, yet the marble-sack root and dragon are present in the Udine herbal (but without the pretzel-curl tail). The Vermont herbal is exactly like the Udine herbal in some ways, but for this plant, a woman and a serpent replace the dragon.

But the Udine and Vermonth herbals don’t follow the English examples either, which generally feature a round cyclamen-style root and numerous flower buds (in contrast to Aristolochia longa, which were drawn without flower buds):

Note that the textual descriptions in the first group above are quite terse, whereas, they are quite a bit more extensive in the Udine/Vermont herbals and the English herbals. Some of these manuscripts were self-contained (e.g., Historia Plantarum), while others were intended to be used with companion texts that had more information about the plants. Still others were never finished.

The Vaguely Lumpy Roots

Now let’s look at the drawings on the left side of the chart, which are mainly from Italian and French manuscripts. You will see immediately that the roots in the manuscripts on the left are drawn differently from those on the right. They are only vaguely lumpy and don’t look like they’ve been stuffed with marbles.

The leaves also tend to be smaller than the Masson/Historia Plantarum group (except for the Udine and Vermont herbals), and lack the double in-curving vine, and there is no dragon (there is, however, a snake in Estense Alpha which might be mnemonic, as one of the names of the plant is “snake root”).

In the left-hand group, the similarity between Circa Instans 626 and Tractatus 9136 is very clear, and if you pay attention to the larger leaf and the turned leaf, the similarity to Egerton 747 also becomes apparent:

Palatino 586 generally follows the basic plant form of the herbals on the left, but often includes unusual figures. In this case, there is an owl at the top of the plant and three faces in the root. The center one might might be an animal, perhaps a dragon, lion, or a demon. Sometimes I can readily identify the inspiration for the figures in Pal. 586, and other times they appear to be unique inventions. Most of them do, however, relate to the plant in some way:

Aristolochia rotunda in Palatino 586 medieval manuscript

Dragon Tails

Let’s take a closer look at the dragons, which are drawn in a fairly distinctive style:

Pics of marble-sack roots and dragons with pretzel-tails illustrating medieval Aristolochia rotunda

There are very obvious similarities between the drawings in rows 1 and 2, even though the row 2 dragons lack wings.

The third group is similar to the first two in significant ways, as in the shape of the root, but there are clear differences in the plant leaves and the way the dragon and serpent are portrayed. Is it a coincidence that the dragon is included with the root? Or did someone see the dragon-style root and then create their own variation?

Here is a closeup of the dragon in BnF Latin 17844, which is essentially the same as the earlier manuscripts but posed a little differently:

Aristolochia rotunda dragon, BnF Latin 17844

The dragon’s neck is curved a little more, and the tail lacks the pretzel, but otherwise it is similar to the Masson/Historia Plantarum and Sloane group.

The Pretzel-Tail Dragon

Long ears, flames, and wings are common in medieval dragons. The tail is usually straight or curled, or is embellished like a leaf motif. Sometimes the tail has another, smaller dragon-head. Here are some examples:

Examples of common dragon styles in medieval art.

Many of these dragons have curled tails, and long wavy ears are easy to find in both Latin and Hebrew manuscripts, but it is difficult to find pretzel tails. Sometimes one can find a clove-hitch tail or a Celtic-knot tail, but they are generally more ornate and decorative than the pretzel-tail:

Ornately-looped dragon tail forom a 15th-century Italian manuscript
Ornate tail with double loop, Felice Feliciano, Verona, Italy, c. 1472

This Bohemian dragon has a pretzel tail, but it is very tightly knotted, has an unusual right-angle and fleur-de-lis tail, and is drawn in a different style from the ones in the herbal manuscripts, with a scalloped outline:

Dragon with curled tail in Graz MS 287
Double curl, tight pretzel-knot and fleur-de-lis tail in Graz MS 287 (13th or 14th century?)

I searched long and hard for examples of pretzel tails and found one that is vaguely like a pretzel in a child’s marginal drawing in a Swiss manuscript:

Marginal drawing rotated [Codex Sang. 754, Glarus, Switzerland, c. 1466 or later]

I’m not sure if this one qualifies. It has a pretzel-tail but also a small dragon-head on the tail. It is early enough to have influenced 14th-century dragons, however, and not all apocalypse dragons have pretzel-tails, so perhaps the twirled tail inspired later artists:

Bodley 180 apocalypse dragon with pretzel-tail
Dragon with multiple heads and pretzel-tail. Bodley Ms 180, possibly London, c. 1272

Here is a pretzel-tail without the extra dragon-head, also from an apocalypse manuscript:

Pretzel-curl dragon in French apocalypse manuscript
Pretzel-tail dragon in French apocalypse manuscript, c. 1360. A passage from Revelation.

I almost didn’t notice these two blue dragons. They are small and tucked away in the corners of very ornate folios. The one on the left isn’t quite a pretzel, it has an extra loop, but the one on the right qualifies:

Blue dragons with pretzel tails in Morgan M.769
Small blue pretzel-tail dragons embellishing the corners of ornate folios. It is easy to overlook them amidst all the other details [Morgan MS M.769, Regensburg, c. 1360].

I was starting to get discouraged. A lot of searching yielded only four manuscripts with pretzel-tail dragons. Then I found this:

Cambridge Pepys Library, Magdalene College, c. 1400

This find is significant because these are diagrams in a model book, specifically created for illustrators to copy. There are numerous dragons of different styles, but this one has a pretzel tail, wings, and long curved ears like those of the Masson group of manuscripts. The only problem is it may have been created a few years later and thus could not have influenced the herbal illustrators.

I haven’t located enough pretzel-tails to generalize about their origins, but the above examples are from England, France, and southern Germany (and possibly Bohemia for the one that is tightly knotted). One thing is clear, they are not common, but they are apparently not localized either.

So let’s get back to the plants, and the Voynich Manuscript…

Is Aristolochia in the VMS?

Are there any drawings in the VMS that resemble drawings of Aristolochia rotunda?

In general, medieval drawings of Aristolochia are slightly viny (some of them are distinctly viny), and most of them have heart-shaped leaves. The arrangement of the leaves is not very accurate—sometimes alternate, sometimes opposite (in real life, Aristolochia leaves are alternate, and lightly clasp the stem).

Flowers are usually only shown in English manuscripts, most of the others omit them. The flowers are in between the leaves. No one drew the seedheads, which look like tiny indented green watermelons.

What about the VMS “dragon” and the nearby plant?

VMS plant 25v with little critter by the plant.

There is a small critter that vaguely resembles a dragon on VMS f25v but the plant has elliptical leaves arranged in a rosette and does not look like Aristolochia. Some have suggested this is a dog pulling out a mandrake plant, but the leaf veins are wrong for mandrake and mandrake was almost always drawn with berry-like fruits and a parsnip-like root.

Plant 25v is far more similar to plants like Plantago, False Hellebore (Veratrum album), Lilium, and Dracaena—plants with parallel veins and whorled leaves—than it is to Aristolochia.

Plantago is not usually shown with a dragon, but there are rare exceptions, as in BnF Latin 17844, which has a long-tailed dragon to the right of the plant. I am skeptical of there being a connection based only on this, however, because the 17844 illustrator drew numerous dragons.

VMS Plant 27v

Perhaps VMS 27v could be considered for Aristolochia. It’s slightly viny and has a puzzle root, but the flowers are completely wrong, the leaves are not heart-shaped or clasping, and the leaf margins are distinctly toothed, so I think 27v (left) is more likely to be something like Agrimony rather than Aristolochia. Agrimony even has a little star-like frilled calyx when it starts to go to seed—similar to the frill on the VMS flowerhead, and there are other plants with distinct frills.

One VMS plant that might qualify as Aristolochia is Plant 1v, which is somewhat viny, has a big lumpy root, and a rounded seedpod. However, there are other plants, like Hypericon and Nightshade that resemble VMS 1v more, and it’s possible the root is mnemonic rather than literal (it looks like a cross between a bear claw and a lump of fabric), so an ID of Aristolochia is tentative.

Summary

It was fun to look for dragons, but I haven’t seen a match for the Masson- or Udine-style dragon in the Voynich Manuscript. I’m not even certain the little critter on 27v is a dragon. Maybe it’s a giraffe-camel, or a turtle with long ears.

As for Aristolochia, lumpy roots can be drawn in many ways and the VMS small-plants section doesn’t include the whole plant, so it’s difficult to identify them with any certainty, but it’s possible that Aristolochia (rotunda or longa) is in there… somewhere.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2019 All Rights Reserved

Butcher’s Broom

24 June 2019

Ruscus plant and woman with broom.

Butcher’s broom is a fascinating plant. It is native to Eurasia and is found in many medieval herbals. It has distinctive flowers and colorful fruits that are aligned with the inner part of the leaf when they first emerge. The branches and leaves are stiff, yet resilient enough to be used for broom-making.

Plant with Polka Dots

Here is a large-sized image of butcher’s broom, Ruscus aculeatus. Note the position of the flowers within the leaf:

Ruscus aculeatus botanical drawing

But if you look closely, you will notice there is a stalk. It’s very slender so the flowers almost appear to be growing out of the leaf, an illusion that was emphasized by many medieval illustrators.

Elizabeth Blackburn botanical drawing of Ruscus.

Even Elizabeth Blackwell drew it this way (which is not 100% accurate, since the fruits tend to hang down when they get ripe, but it gets across the impression that most people have of the plant).

But it isn’t just an illusion…

Some species of Ruscus have a flower that actually grows out of the leaf.

For example, Ruscus hypoglossum, also called Alexandrina’s laurel, and Ruscus hypophyllum have this charming adaptation:

Ruscus species flower and berry
Ruscus hypophyllum flowers and Ruscus hypoglossum berries growing from the inner part of the leaf [Images: Laurha of España and A. Karpov, Wikipedia]

Many species of this plant are shrubby and have a fairly extensive rhizome (side-growing root from which new shoots may emerge). R. hypoglossum has an additional peculiarity, a little leaflet that covers the flower and sometimes looks like it’s pinching the berry, a quirk that inspired the name Double Tongue:

Botanical drawing of Alexandrina laurel, Ruscus hypoglossum.

Medieval Ruscus

Both the unusual form of Ruscus and the fine-stemmed form of Ruscus are found in medieval herbals and many of them are drawn with dots on the leaves or red spots to represent the berries. Depending on the region and the species, they have names like Abrusca, Brusci, Brusse, and Bonifacia.

Some manuscripts included both kinds of Ruscus, but most of them chose one. Here are some examples from my files, from 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts:

Exampls of medieval Ruscus

Dots on Leaves

Is there a VMS plant with dots on the leaves? Yes. Plants 3r and 39r have dots, but there are many dots, drawn in lines, and the plants don’t look like Ruscus:

VMS plants with spots

There is also a three-leaved plant in the small-plants section with dots on the leaves, but there isn’t enough detail to identify the plant. The label oraro isn’t much help either. It’s possible it is something like clover or medicago, which have spots or chevrons and which have leaves in groups of three, but it’s difficult to know for sure.

Plant 7v

What about Plant 7v? It has a prominent spot in the middle of each leaf. Could it be Ruscus?

Voynich Manuscript Plant 7r

No, I don’t think so. Obviously the dots are not flowers or seeds because the seedhead is at the top of the stalk. It’s a different kind of plant from Ruscus, one with a nicely drawn basal rosette, red and green leaves (this is a common trait in plants of this shape). It appears to have hairy or spiny leaves (I’m leaning toward hairy since there are other VMS plants that have more pointy margins that might be spiny). In contrast to the VMS plant, Ruscus leaves are smooth and very distinctly green.

Plant 7v has a tap root, Ruscus has a lumpy rhizome.

So if it’s not Ruscus, what is it?

Some plants have spots that are part of the plant. For example, some species of Orchis and Arum have brown speckles. Pulmonaria has numerous whitish spots (in fact, I think Plant 39r might represent Pulmonaria).

Some plants have specific parasites or diseases that consistently create spots. Some have spots that look like rust (e.g., Saxifraga mutata).

Overall Shape & Characteristics

There is a group of smallish herbs that look like VMS 7v. Most of them are small-to-medium-sized in height. They all have a tall slender central stalk and several of them have rounded seedheads. A few of the leaves grow up the stalk, but most are concentrated at the base in a whorl. Many of them are hairy.

This group of plants often has a mixture of red and green leaves later in the year when the plant goes to seed, and many of them have tap roots or a few fine tendrils similar in shape to buttercup roots.

Some of them have spots, some of them have little bumps on the leaves that look like spots because they are sufficiently raised to create shadows (e.g., Arabis, Erophila, Limonium, Silene sedoides, some species of Androsace, and Draba).

Here are some examples showing the overall form. Note the basal rosettes on the herbarium specimen bottom right is most similar in orientation to the VMS drawing. Basal rosettes were often drawn as though flattened in medieval manuscripts:

Examples of Saxifrage, Draba, Arabis, Silene, Limonium basic plant shapes, all of which are fairly similar in general form.

There are also plants that look like 7v that catch dew on their leaves, which make round sparkly dots, and have little teeth on the edges of the leaves, like Lewisia cotyledon. Some plants are incurved and collect a single drop of dew, but not all of them have hairy leaves.

It’s hard to choose among these plants. They are all very similar and all have distinctive bumps or spots, and many have red leaves mixed with the green, or are distinctly red and green later in the year, but the VMS seedheads appear to be somewhat rounded, and Arabis tends to produce long narrow pods, so perhaps Arabis is less likely than some of the others. Draba has rounded seedpods but it’s still difficult to eliminate the others.

Summary

I hope it is clear from these examples that Plant 7v is not likely to be Butcher’s broom. It has the wrong overall shape and a completely different seed stalk. Which of the rosette herbs it might be is difficult to say, but the seedheads are more similar to Draba and Silene than most of the others.

J.K. Petersen

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

Mixed-Up Musa

Did medieval illustrators confuse Musa (which we now know as banana) with another plant labeled “muse”? Early drawings of “muse” fruits don’t look like bananas. They are small, with pointy ends. In fact, the taste of “muse” was likened to cucumber or melon, fruits that are much more watery than banana. Yet as time went on, the descriptions, drawings, and the name were changed to “Musa”, which we know as banana/plantain plants.

Bananas and other eastern or African semitropical and tropical plants were probably known to Europeans through word-of-mouth, just as they had heard of hyenas but apparently had not seen them. Medieval drawings of hyenas are quite fanciful, and sometimes understood only by their labels. Is this what happened to banana plants? Did they invent the drawings and call them “muse”, or are the early herbals depicting some other plant that became confused with banana plants as knowledge of the banana gradually spread through Europe?

Sugar cane was known in Europe from early times (although it was not imported into northern Europe until later), probably because it’s easier to ship than many kinds of plants, but bananas are not easy to ship. They bruise and ferment and thus were not as familiar to Europeans as sugar cane in the early Middle Ages.

Historical Background

There were a number of plants locally called “muse/musse/mus” in the Middle Ages—field plants like “mouse ear” that are similar to Hieracium, but they don’t look like the 14th-century drawings labeled “muse/musse” in manuscripts such as the Manfredus herbal, or in the various copies of Tacuinum Sanitatis.

So if “muse” is not the mouse-ear plant (which is often included in herbal manuscripts under other names, and usually drawn fairly accurately), and it’s not banana, then what is it?

Lining up the Illustrations

Maybe Egerton 747, the Manfredus du Monte herbal, and versions of Tacuinum Sanitatis can provide clues. There is a plant in the Manfredus manuscript that has an analog in both form and name that might easily be confused with banana.

First note how “muse/musse” is drawn. It’s not a good representation of a banana plant. It has a basal whorl of upright lanceolate leaves, similar in shape to Inula, and nut-like dangling fruits sometimes painted red, sometimes yellow (this color difference is significant, as will be illustrated later). Banana plants might look vaguely like this when they first start to sprout, but the stalks grow substantially before they bear fruit and the fruits do not hang on long stalks with skinny petioles above the leaves.

Sometimes the fruits of “muse” are drawn a little more capsule-shaped, with striations, but these too are quite different from banana. The image on the left is from the Manfredus herbal (late 14th century), those in the middle are from two different versions of Tacuinum Sanitatus:

In the text that accompanies earlier drawings of “muse”, the leaves have been compared to Inula (which does not resemble banana leaves), and the taste has been compared to melon and to citric fruits (which doesn’t match well with banana either).

So there are several problems with assuming that “muse” is Musa (banana):

  • The name is different.
  • The leaves are shaped and positioned differently.
  • The fruit stalks are much too tall and the fruits too discrete and the wrong shape for bananas.
  • The description of the taste doesn’t fit banana.

In later herbals, the descriptions start to sound more like banana (based on the assumption that “muse” was an alternate spelling for “musa”) and the name is changed to “musa”. Eventually drawings and descriptions of real banana plants are substituted.

Other Possibilities

Is there a plant that matches “muse” better than banana?

Yes. I don’t know if it’s the correct plant, but melegueta matches better to the drawing and description of “muse” than the banana.

And here’s the interesting part (and another reason it might be confused with banana). Banana became known as Musa paradisa. The melegueta plant is known as “pomum paradisi” (apple of paradise). Thus, if someone unfamiliar with melegueta saw the name “muse” in combination with “paradisi” they might assume it was a banana plant.

Here are some images of melegueta and cardamom. Melegueta is a west-African plant with lanceolate leaves. It has slightly dangling fruits on spindly stalks, and the ripening fruits are often red or yellow:

pic of melegueta plant

Comparison of “muse” plant with leaves and fruits of pomum paradisi, the melegueta plant. Image credits: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com, tropical.theferns.info, sciencedirect.com.

Medieval illustrators aren’t the only ones who appear to have confused “musa” (banana) with early depictions of a plant called “muse”—15th-century annotators and 17th- and 18th-century commentators made the same mistake. No one appears to have critically evaluated the way medieval descriptions and drawings changed over the course of two centuries from “muse” (pomum paradisi) to Musa paradisi (banana), nor have they investigated what exactly was meant by “muse” in the earlier herbals. It has long been assumed that the old herbals, even ones with good illustrations, specifically included erroneous descriptions and bad drawings of banana plants rather than reasonable drawings of a different plant.

The drawing and description of “muse” is similar in shape, proportion, name, and colors to melegueta and a few other Amomum species, but there’s more…

I found two additional pieces of evidence to support this tentative ID.

  • The first has to do with taste, which is described in one early medieval source as “citric” (I don’t think anyone would describe the taste of banana as citric). The Wikipedia entry for melegueta describes the taste as peppery “with hints of citrus”.
  • The second is a sequence of plants in Egerton 747 (c. late 13th century), a reference that bears many similarities to the Manfredus herbal (some say Manfredus is copied from Egerton 747, others say both are copied from a common source). In Egerton 747, is a series of shrubby trees, beginning with Nux muscata and ending with Nux vomica. Note that it includes Nux sciarca (melegueta):

In the Manfredus herbal, the mystery plant “muse” follows “muscata”. If “muse” is meant to represent melegueta, it’s more accurate than the picture of melegueta in Egerton 747, but what is even more significant is that it follows closely to muscata. Manfredus does not correspond 1-to-1 to Egerton plants, but the contents and sequence are very similar.

Melegueta (Aframomum grana-paradisi) is a medicinal plant in the ginger family with anti-inflammatory properties. It is native to coastal west Africa, and is related to cardamom. Its inclusion in Egerton 747 suggests that it was known in Europe at least since the late 13th century (possibly through Arab traders).

There are several Amomum plants that should be considered together with melegueta, including Amomum villosum, Amomum cardamom, and Amomum compactum (false cardamom).

Note that the Manfredus and Tacuinum drawings of “muse” resemble Amomum plants more closely when they are younger. Melegueta leaves tend to become more palm-like as the plant grows, although some of the other Amomum species remain more lanceolate, like the drawings above.

Summary

I’m not sure how a name like Nux melegueta or Amomum might become “muse”*, but it’s not surprising that “muse” (pomum paradisi) might be confused with “musa paradisi” (banana).

Name changes are not uncommon. “Earth apple” used to refer to Cyclamen, a common medicinal plant with a big lump of a root. After the conquest of America and import of New World plants into Europe, the potato came to be known as the “earth apple” (pomme de terre) and Cyclamen gradually lost the name.

But I don’t think this is a case of the name changing. I think it’s the result of confusion…

Aframomum and Musa (banana) plants were not well-known in the west and had similar names (pomum paradisi vs. musa paradisi).

The 13th- and 14th-century drawings and descriptions of “muse” match well to melegueta and a few of the other Amomum species, and less well to banana. By the middle of the 15th century, traditional descriptions were altered to better fit the banana and the name was changed to “musa” and, finally, by the 16th century, the name “musa” was paired with drawings of actual banana plants and the name “muse” seems to have disappeared.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2018 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved


Postscript, Nov. 10, 2018: One possible origin of the plant name “muse” that I forgot to include is hinted at in this quotation from classical Greek, which connects the Muses with a plant called “amomum” as follows:

“… Then he wove in Damagetus (a dark violet); Callimachus’ myrtle—sweet, but ever full of sour honey—; Euphorion’s rose campion; and the Muses’ amomum, who takes his name from the Dioscuri.”

It’s not enough information to identify the plant (Fée suggested Amomum racemosum, but there is no consensus of opinion) or to know if a connection between the muses and something called “amomum” still existed in the Middle Ages, but it might be worth filing for future study.

*Perhaps the answer is closer to the home of the plant itself. The Timneh tribes of Sierra Leone generally refer to the amoma/melegueta plants as “massa” (The Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, Volume 16, J. & A. Churchill., 1857. See also detailed discussion in Elements of Materia Medica).

C-3P oh?

C-3PO, of Star Wars fame, knows more than 6 million forms of communication, so maybe he can read Voynichese. Unfortunately, he’s signing autographs on distant planets, so I had to solve this puzzle for myself. Even if you can’t read abbreviated medieval script, you will probably notice this folio includes encoded data.

The following sample is from a 15th century text that deals mainly with astrology but I could see that the subject matter had changed (or, at least, the focus had changed) when I reached folios 160 to 169. I looked around the Web to make sure no one else had already posted about this section and couldn’t find anything, so here it is…

Each folio has two columns. Each column has text on the left and cryptic letters and numbers on the right. This manuscript (BSB CLM 667) is from the late 15th century, but I have seen diagrams in other manuscripts from the mid-15th century that represent information in somewhat similar ways.

As I glanced through it, I noticed these are lists of plant names written with common Latin abbreviations, including abrotanum, gariofilatum, anetum, berberis, tamarisci, malva, strignos, turbitus, costus, epithimum, polipodium, and others. The spelling is slightly unconventional, but the names are consistent with plant names in medicinal herbals.

So what is the encoded information next to the plant name?

I was intrigued because I’ve long suspected that at least some Voynichese might be expressed in novel ways. In fact, I’m hoping it is because it would be more satisfying to discover that it’s a terse code rather than nonsense text. So, several years ago, I labored for almost a year to create a color-coded “concordance” of every token in the VMS, looking for patterns that

  1. might be specific to certain sections of the manuscript,
  2. might link separate sections, or
  3. might recur on certain locations on each plant or other section-specific page. If such patterns could be identified, it might be possible to zero in on sections of codified information that occur on more than one page.

But back to analyzing the text to the right side of each column…

Years of looking at ancient and medieval herbals helped me puzzle out the CLM 667 text in a few seconds because the plant names gave me the context I needed to interpret the rest (I wish the VMS were as cooperative, but then I guess there would be no mystery to solve).

This is how it works…

You’ll notice in Clm 667 that the first glyph in each column is a letter, and is sometimes followed by a number or another letter.

Note that each sequence begins with c or f. That instantly reminded me of Latin calidus and frigidus, properties or “temperaments” that the ancient Greeks associated with each kind of plant.

In ancient medicine, they believed that plants should be chosen to balance their properties against those of the illness. For example, if you had a fever (were hot and sweaty) then plants that were “cold” and “dry” might be suitable for “balancing” your humors. Thus, they felt it important to assign and record these properties.

So, guessing that the first letter represented hot or cold gave me clues to the rest of the sequence. If there was a number after the c or f, it indicated the degree to which this plant embodied the stated property. For example c 2 would represent calidus (hot) in the 2nd degree or f p’ (notice the cap, which is a Latin abbreviation symbol) would mean frigidus (cold) in the 1st degree, with p’ (which can also be abbreviated as p’° or ) representing primo gradu .

I noted that if the next character was a letter rather than a number, it was always s or h. That confirmed my hunch about c and f. Plants are categorized as hot or cold and dry or wet. In Latin, dry is siccus and wet is humidus. So, if the annotation is f s 2, it stands for frigidus et siccus in secondo gradu.

In contrast, here is a more traditional example for absinthium in an herbal manuscript (Historia Plantarum), created c. 1400, in which the plant is described as calidum et siccum (hot and dry), followed by additional information that it is hot in the first degree and dry in the second. The verbose entry requires 49 characters (including the macron but not including the spaces):

In contrast, the writer of Clm 667 created a simple system for classifying properties of plants that can be expressed with four characters or less.

Now imagine if the lists in Clm 667 were converted to a cipher system. Like the VMS, the text would be extremely repetitious, and it would be very difficult to discern what kind of information was in the “properties” text (especially if the spaces were removed or represented by null characters). Also, like the VMS, the glyph positions would be more regimented than narrative text—certain glyphs would occur more often at the beginning, some more often at the end.

Summary

There are several reasons for posting this example…

  • It illustrates medieval evolution in representing information,
  • it provides a 15th-century example of codified plant data that is outside the mainstream (not everything was slavishly copied in the Middle Ages),
  • it demonstrates that VMS labels shouldn’t be assumed to be nouns (I’ve noticed this  is a very widespread assumption among Voynich researchers)—they may be abbreviated or encoded character traits (easy to say, but this example demonstrates how it might be done),
  • it expressly demonstrates that VMS text should not be assumed to be wholly linguistic. The text may be abbreviated in a number of ways… the VMS could include scribal abbreviations that are linguistic or symbolic, or an entirely different system of coding,
  • if there is codified data that includes numbers, then the majority of Voynich “solutions” are inadequate even if they turn out to be partially right—very few researchers include numbers in their proposed solutions, even though numbers are commonly found in medieval manuscripts, and
  • it provides an example of a system that might account for glyph-priority within tokens.

The idea that the VMS might be ultra-abbreviated is not new—the possibility has been mentioned by others. Highly verbose codes have also been suggested—neither contention has yet been demonstrated or proved.

I’ve been investigating the possibility of codified text for almost as long as I’ve known about the VMS because I’m familiar with data encoding in scientific papers and noticed many of the VMS tokens were quite short and formulaic, but finding a medieval example to confirm that this kind of thinking existed in the 15th century can be difficult if you are explicitly searching for it. Sometimes it’s better to wait until a suitable example comes along, as happened with Clm 667.

J.K. Petersen

© 2018 J.K. Petersn, All Rights Reserved

Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

In a recent Cipher Mysteries blog, Nick Pelling wrote: “I believe that most Voynich researchers would agree that – very unusually – a single plant seems to appear in three separate places in the manuscript: f17v, f96v, and f99r. “

Although I’m a fan of Nick’s blog, I don’t agree! My immediate reaction was, “No way!”

  • Plant 17v has hastate leaves and more upright growth habit (possibly an upright plant or climbing vine).
  • Plant 96v has sagittate leaves and is probably tall (and might be a climbing variety and might not).
  • Plant 99r has heart-shaped leaves and a viny habit (possibly a semi-climbing vine that grows more horizontally than the first plant) and a differently shaped root from the first two.

This cannot be dismissed as mere differences in drawing style. Some details are defining, others are embellishments… to a botanist, these specific details are identification keys and I’m quite sure the VMS illustrator cared about the difference because the leaf margins and veins of many of the plants are carefully drawn to make the same kinds of distinctions. The various plant drawings are also specific as to whether they are solitary, viny, or clumpy. Whoever drew them knew a few things about plants.

Comparing the Three Plant Drawings

I spent months studying the VMS drawing style and how certain specific parts of the plants were differentiated before trying to identify them. Whoever drew them, especially the more naturalistic ones, cared about anatomical features. From a botanical viewpoint, these drawings represent three different leaf types and three different growth habits.

Note the way 96v is bent—it’s almost folded in half. In botanical drawings (and dried specimens), if the plant is too big to fit on the page, the illustrator will bend them to show that the plant has a long stalk. It doesn’t always mean it’s a vine, it sometimes means it’s a tall plant. Note that 96v does not have any tendrils and the stalk is not wiggly like the other two:

Plant 17v and 96v are superficially similar, but the plant on the left has hastate leaves, the one on the right has broader, more sagittate (arrow-shaped leaves). These distinctions are important for identification. They might be the same plant family (possibly Rumex), but it’s unlikely that they are the same species.

Plant 99r has heart-shaped leaves, a shape that is very common to tuberous vines. There are quite a few plants that could be represented by this drawing (see examples below), a number of which are in medieval manuscripts.

The first two examples might be from the same plant family, but probably not the same plant species. The first might be a viny plant, and the third is probably a viny plant. The second is more likely an upright plant. The first might not even be a vine—the “tendril” might not be a tendril—it might be the stalk that is extended to create a face as a mnemonic or tribute.

Visual Examples

The following chart includes botanical drawings with hastate leaves:

Now note that Plant 96v is different from 17v and 54v. It has broader, less “pinched” leaves, more sagittate than hastate (it’s probably a species of Rumex or Atriplex, although Smilax and a few other species could also be considered):

Plant 99r is different again. It is distinctly viny with heart-shaped leaves (possibly a viny Rumex, Polygonum, Bryonia, Dioscorea, or Convolvulus):

To Sum Up

I assembled these charts very quickly—grabbing examples that were on hand, due to time constraints—it’s really more of a comment response than a blog, but hopefully it’s enough to illustrate important differences that exist between the three VMS plant drawings.

There are instances of drawings in the big-plants section being duplicated in the small-plants section (I have compiled a list of them), but I think these three specific drawings are probably different species and hopefully the examples illustrate why.

J.K. Petersen

Copyright © 2018 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Tropes

7 January 2018

What are those eyes, faces, animals, dragons, demons, and other oddities added to plant drawings in herbal manuscripts? In medieval society, there were no encyclopedias, nature shows, or PDAs, and a very high proportion of the population was illiterate, so these added details served as memory aids to help the reader understand the plant.

Palatino 586, an herbal manuscript created around the same time as the VMS, has a large number of figural drawings associated with the plants, but they are hard to see due to the low resolution of the scans. Hopefully some day better scans will be available so we can fully appreciate their intricacy and significance. A few years ago, I did my best to read the text and interpret the drawings and was able to puzzle out some of the enigmatic additions.

This small selection of examples provides basic tips on interpreting the drawings.

Let’s start with one of the easier ones…

Page 10, Lower Left and Right

On page 10, the text introduces Auru’ (Aurum), which is Latin for gold. Underneath is a royal figure with gold scepter and crown. It was not uncommon for metals and minerals to be included in herbal texts, as some were used for medicinal purposes or as ingredients in composite formulae. In this case, the memory trigger is not medicinal uses, but common uses—the king holds a large gold coin, orb, or platter. The sun, suggesting a golden color or light, shines close by.

To fully understand this drawing, however, you have to look at the next one, which describes Argent (silver). It won’t surprise modern viewers to see gold and silver together, as they are both precious metals used for similar purposes, but in medieval times, there were additional reasons for pairing these metals and the drawing helps to explain this. We see a personified mountain, indicating that silver is an ore that must be mined, but the figure next to it is pointing to a scroll that refers to luna (the moon) because plants, metals, and minerals were considered to have governing bodies up in the heavens. They believed that gold and silver were ruled by the sun and the moon and shared some of their properties.

Page 11 Top Left and Right

On page 11 is a slightly more enigmatic drawing—a woman and a dog consuming round objects next to a plant with lumps on the stem. Reading the text we see [A]sa fetida, now known as Ferula asafoetida. This is a large resinous herb that exudes sap from the lower stem and root. Dried and crushed, the resin has long been used as a flavoring agent and medicinal substance. Thus, the illustration indicates that this is consumed by humans, but why the dog? As it turns out, in both eastern and western medicine, asafoetida was used to treat digestive difficulties in dogs and horses. It can be found as a remedy in historic copies of Materia Medica that were adapted for veterinary use.

To the right, on page 11, is a plant clearly labeled Agnus castus (Vitex agnus-castus), a name found in many herbal compendia. It’s an attractive shrubby tree with long lilac-colored spikes.

The drawing is quite amusing. On the left is a pretty young damsel extending a friendly hand. On the right, the fellow is turning a shoulder, averting his eyes, and trying to wave her away. The common name for this plant is “chaste tree” as it was believed it could subdue sexual passion. It also earned the name of “monk’s pepper” in religious orders that promoted chastity.

Most of the mnemonic figures in Palatino 586 are not found in other manuscripts with similarly drawn plants—they are unique to this codex.

Page 12 Lower Left

The name Apium emoyraydarum/hemorodarum is obsolete but Apium (usually A. graveolens) is historically used as a food, flavoring, and treatment for hemorrhoids and fistulas. Knights in armor frequently suffered various forms of sores and abscesses in the groin from long chafing horseback rides.

The diagram rather graphically shows a hand with a pointed object (probably a doctor’s hand with a surgical tool) and the patient with his butt and anus exposed. After a fistula was pierced or tied off, a salve that included Apium was used to coat the area to soothe the skin and help prevent infection.

Page 14 Bottom Right

The next image is a bit more challenging to interpret, partly because of the rooster, and partly because scholars long disputed which plant might be the source of the gum called Armoniacus/Ammoniacum.

You might notice in the picture that the plant is large, and the fellow with the axe confirms that this was a tree-like herb of considerable size compared to other similar species.

Note the three stripes on one of the branches. Cuts are made to encourage the sap to ooze out and as it dries, it forms lumps of resin which, in this drawing, are collected in a barrel.

There are a number of plants that exude gum from their stalks or roots and asafoetida has already been mentioned on Palatino 586, page 11, so the plant on page 14 is probably one of the Ferulas or fennel plants, several of which were known in the Middle Ages.

So far, so good, but what about the rooster?

The gum resin called ammoniacum is obtained from Dorema ammoniacum (a plant that can grow to nine feet). It was imported from India through Persia, but this form of gum was probably not known in the west in the Middle Ages. Instead, medieval herbals make reference to a gum from Africa. One possibility is Ferula tingitana, a south and east Mediterranean tree-like plant called Giant Fennel, but scholars have long doubted this. In the 18th and 19th centuries they proposed Ferula linkii and Ferula communis as better options. Some even suggested ammoniacum might come from Sylphium, the famous plant on ancient coins that is thought to have gone extinct due to over-harvesting (it was reputed to have chemicals effective for birth control).

The dispute was finally settled (or so they thought) by growing one of the plants in the famous Kew gardens, and waiting until it bloomed to discover its species. The verdict was Ferula communis, a plant that grows in two common forms.

Ferula communis, also known as giant fennel, narthex, or laser, is thought to be the source of gum ammoniac in the Middle Ages. However, some of the ancient herbals indicate another possibility. [Photo credit: Jan van der Straaten]

I’m not so sure the identity has been settled, and Palatino 586 adds a fascinating piece of history not found anywhere else by including a rooster with spurs. When I first saw it, I wondered if the spurs might be related to the slices on the trees, but some investigation of historic herbals revealed another possibility…

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, but if you look at drawings of Ferula in herbal manuscripts, you will notice they are usually drawn like the following examples. Even Palatino 586 includes a plant labeled Ferula that has this form:

None of these images gives a clue as to why “spurs” are emphasized in Palatino 586, but this one might:

In a previous example, a dog was used to illustrate the use of the plant. In this case, I think the rooster is intended to help the reader identify the plant.

Ferula communis sometimes has spurlike projections, but it’s not a defining characteristic of the plant. Ferula tingitana is more spurlike than F. communis—it has leaf-like projections at the points where the stems branch—but they may not be prominent enough to inspire someone to draw a cowboy-rooster. However, there is another plant that is harvested for gum that is used medicinally that may be intended by these drawings.

Ferula narthex (right) is sometimes assumed to be another name for Ferula communis, possibly because the name narthex was loosely applied to many species of Ferula. However, F. narthex is a tall west Asian plant with thick stems that is more upright than F. communis, with very distinctive “spurs” at each node. It was probably known in Europe long before Dorema ammoniacum was imported.

Page 15 Lower Left

Anacer’u’ on page 15 probably refers to Anacardium and the maiden on the left is using a stick to knock the nuts from the tree. This is not the New World cashew, known as Anacardium orientale, but a cashew-like tree from India (Semecarpus anacardium) that was used for a wide variety of culinary and medicinal purposes. When black, the fruit is toxic, so it is harvested when it is a reddish color. I’m not sure what the maiden on the right is holding—it’s hard to see the details. It might be two bell-like vessels, or two pieces intended to fit together.

On page 16, the drawings are quite interesting. On the top left is Amigdale amare—bitter almond, a plant with a toxic seed. There’s a bird from the parrot family top-left, a dog by the base of the tree, and a woman’s face with something streaming out of the tree toward her cheek.

The bird can probably be explained by this Wikipedia photo by Jonathan Cardy, which illustrates the wild parakeet’s fondness for the flowers:

Bitter almond was known to kill dogs, even large dogs, and old medical texts state that the distilled liquid from the seeds produces dizziness, vertigo, and tinnitus in humans, which explains the liquid flowing from the tree to the ear of the woman on the ground.

Page 16 Top-Right

The image to the right also includes a bird at the top and a variety of faces at the bottom. Note that the demon-like face in the middle is somewhat rounded. This is to distinguish Aristolochia rotunda from A. longa, which has a slender root. In Sloane 4016, CLM 28531, and the Carrara herbal, dragons are drawn at the base of the plant, under the root. This is partly to indicate the name of the plant (serpentaria, snakeroot) and partly to indicate its purported use as an antidote to snake poison. It was also known to be toxic, which might explain the demon-like face in the 586 drawing. It is currently believed that aristolochic acid might contribute to kidney and bladder problems.

I don’t know whether they knew this by observation in the Middle Ages, but insects that eat the leaves of Aristolochia are injesting “chemical armor” that makes them toxic to birds.

The face on the bottom left presents a bit of a puzzle but maybe this is Aristotle providing a mnemonic for the name of the plant.

I can’t explain the catlike face on the right, with something like breath coming out of its nose, but perhaps it’s related to the smell of the plant. Aristolochia uses scent mimicry to lure pollinators, but it’s doubtful this was known in medieval times.

Page 22 Upper Right

The text for the drawing on page 22 is incomplete, it says only Alla. es herba, but the drawing is accurate and one can immediately recognize the plant as Oxalis acetosella, plus, the figural drawing confirms this. We see a man dressed in monk’s robes holding a scroll on which is written “alleluya…” which is the common name for this plant and a word used in hymns. Note the rounded shape from which the scroll is emanating—it may represent the mouth of a singer or a horn, and the man’s head is thrown back with his mouth wide open.

Note how the rhizome (side-growing root) is drawn. I have Oxalis in my garden in a shady spot where almost nothing else will grow and it spreads quite rapidly through rhizomes, and yet the Manfredus and Carrara herbals, Sloane 4016, Morgan M.873, and Harley 3736 (to give a few examples), show only a basic root. Probably the best-known herbal that includes the rhizome is Egerton 747 (ca 1295).

Page 25 Upper-Right

This is an interesting drawing with a bird on the left and a double-headed figure on the right with something horn-shaped by his mouth. It is labeled Bleta album.

Bleta refers to leaf and is usually associated with various forms of spinach and beet plants, valued for their edible leaves. However, this is obviously not chard, which has a mass of broad leaves growing low to the ground rather than jaggy leaves growing up the stalk. There are other forms, such as Bleta trigyna, that grow in this fashion.

Blitum bonus-henricus looks like this drawing when it is flattened and dried, the ruffled leaves taking on a more spiky appearance, and is commonly known as Good King Henry or Poor man’s asparagus. This is not based on an English king, however, it apparently comes from Heinrich which may, in turn stem from Old High German Heimrih (home ruler).

I’m not completely sure of the meaning of this drawing, but if the plant is Good King Henry, then perhaps the two-headed figure on the right is a troubadour with an extra head on his jester’s hat. Troubadours were performers skilled in puppeteering, acrobatics, juggling, clowning, and music—circus performers who were sometimes under the patronage of a ruler or noble house.

If the object in his mouth is a wind instrument, then it would fit with a king’s court filled with entertainers, and would evoke the name of the plant. It’s possible the bird is included because the seeds of the chenopods are very popular with birds. I’m not sure, however, since the seed tassels are not shown (perhaps because they are not the part of the plant that is used by humans).

On page 26 top-left, we see a woman wielding a broom, a common use for Bruscus ruscus. For page 28 lower-right, read the story about castoreum on a previous blog.

This is becoming long, so I’ll conclude with just one more…

The drawing on page 30 (left) might interest Voynich researchers because there’s a bath, but to understand what’s going on, one has to identify the plant. I’m fairly certain this is Cuminum cyminum (caraway).

Cyminum was used as a relaxant and soother of swollen bronchial tubes, so imagine that you’re sick with a bad cold and you treat it with a nice hot bath and a steam-pot full of herbs to help clear your sinuses.

The picture on the right might not be a steam pot. It looks like she is holding a spoon, so perhaps the drawing on the left indicates the relaxant properties and the one on the right illustrates the plant’s use as a digestive aid.

Summary

This is just a small selection of examples, there are approximately 300 individual figures associated with plants on the first 60 pages so it’s not possible to cover more than a tiny percentage in one blog, but it should be enough to illustrate that the figures serve a variety of purposes—sometimes indicating the use of the plant, sometimes physical properties that set it apart from similar species, and sometimes the name.

J.K. Petersen

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