Tag Archives: Voynich Manuscript plants

Back to the Drawing Board

http://ramblingfisherman.com/2011/09/fall-fishing-in-the-stamp-river/ 8 August 2019

uk Seroquel 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