Tag Archives: Voynich manuscript

A Crusty Conundrum

15 February 2016

Cancer the Crayfish

The zodiac symbol for Cancer in the Voynich Manuscript is odd in a number of ways, but not in the ways I originally thought.

Cancer is drawn as a crab in most Mediterranean areas (left), as well as in much of England (possibly due to the abundance of salt water and crabs) but was often depicted as a crayfish, as well, particularly in regions away from the coast, so Cancer as a crayfish is not unusual, but the VMS crayfish has some strange quirks that might not be immediately apparent.

To begin with, there are two critters, not one. I’ve never seen a medieval Cancer symbol presented as a double image, with each crayfish facing in a different direction. Pisces is usually drawn this way, but not Cancer. Also, the line connecting their mouths is typical of Pisces, not of Cancer. Something unusual is going on.

The Anatomy of Crayfish

When I first saw it, the VMS crayfish looked unrealistic to me—skinny legs, tiny claws. I thought all crayfish and lobsters had fat hunky claws. Apparently not.

After some research, I learned that there are crayfish with slender legs and small claws. I also discovered the claws of the female are sometimes smaller than the male.

Skinny-limbed crayfish don’t live in one particular region. They range from Korea to the Caribbean and probably beyond, so the skinny limbs don’t help pinpoint the geography.

Nature is endlessly creative and the patterns on the backs of crayfish are quite varied. Some are like helmets, others have bands, some connect over the top in two layers.

Zodiac crayfish are sometimes drawn with two C-shapes mirroring one another on their backs, a pattern that is also found in nature. There are some where the C-shapes connect over the top and others, like the drawing on the right, that don’t connect. From the side, they look like a piece of armor protecting the shoulder. The VMS crayfish appears to have a smaller version of this detail.

From Life or From Manuscript Tradition?

I wondered whether the VMS illustrator got the ideas for the zodiac by looking at a real crayfish or at other drawings. The upper one is green, the lower is red. Green or a greenish-gray is a common color for crayfish. When they are cooked, they turn bright red like lobsters, so the colors don’t provide many hints to the origin of the VMS. But that’s when I noticed the VMS crayfish was anatomically incorrect.

I was so distracted by the double image, the skinny legs and claws, and the line connecting the mouths that I overlooked a rather glaring defect—the VMS crayfish legs are attached to the tail! This unbalanced crayfish would have a hard time getting around. Given this anomaly, it seems unlikely that a real crayfish modeled for the VMS. Whoever drew it probably took the concept from other drawings and may have drawn it imperfectly from memory, since other Cancer symbols (at least those similar to the VMS) aren’t drawn this way.

Almost all the medieval zodiacs I found that were similar to the VMS (slender limbs plus C-shape backs) were Lombardic and Frankish and were typically green or red. I haven’t had a chance to map them yet, and the overall impression may change when I do, but it’s true of the ones I’ve found so far.

Summary

The VMS zodiac animals, such as the ram and bull, don’t seem to be drawn from life. They’re reasonably well done but, like the crayfish, they have some anatomical oddities. It seems likely they were inspired by other manuscripts—they follow the general format and style of the time. But there’s also a certain individuality to them. Enclosing the zodiac in a ring is very typical, but combining two crayfish in the same circle is quite unusual.

The ecclesiastical library of St. Gallen, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

If the drawings were done from memory, then perhaps it wasn’t easy for the illustrator to copy directly from manuscripts (assuming the VMS author even wanted to do that). In the Middle Ages, the main repositories for manuscripts were libraries: ecclesiastical, university, and the personal libraries of the nobility. Some were probably housed by commercial calligraphy and illustration services, as well. Books were entirely handcrafted and, as such, were rare and expensive. Many books in libraries were chained to prevent theft—they could only be seen during viewing hours.

The VMS depiction of Cancer leaves many unanswered questions. Why two symbols? Why the line connecting two crayfish? Why is one green (with red highlights) and the other red? Why such diminutive C-shapes, compared to other zodiacs, and the ultra-skinny legs? Why are the C-shapes drawn so much smaller than other zodiacs?

Is the crayfish quirky because it was drawn from memory, or is it different because the VMS illustrator had a unique way of doing things?

Posted by J.K. Petersen

The Strong Solution 6 Feb. 2016

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The Strange Story of Leonell Strong

Antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich rediscovered the VMS in a cache of old books in Italy but failed to uncover the contents of the text.

Antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich rediscovered the VMS in a cache of old books in Italy but never solved the mystery of the text.

In 1945, Leonell Strong claimed to have solved the mysterious text of the Voynich Manuscript. He was not the first to attempt to decipher it after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich acquired it and brought it to America as the Great War broke out in Europe.

In his lifetime, Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer, corresponded with many people in an effort to decode the VMS and solidify its provenance. If it could be connected with important historical figures, the value would increase and Voynich, a businessman, would profit from his investment.

Voynich died in 1930, no wiser about the contents of the manuscript than when he began. After his death, his wife, Ethel Voynich, continued to try to unlock its secrets, to no avail. William Friedman, an eminent cryptologist, initiated a study group to decipher it in 1944 but, with the war looming large (and perhaps because of lack of progress), the study group was disbanded, in 1946.

You can read an extensive history and ongoing research at voynich.nu.

The manuscript was eventually sold to Hans P. Kraus, who also failed to decode it or sell it at his asking price of $160,000. Kraus eventually donated it to the Beinecke Library, in 1969, where it remains to this day. Before this happened however, Leonell Strong, cancer scientist and amateur cryptographer, came into the picture around the same time Friedman’s study group was trying to decode the manuscript.

The Strong Approach

Leonell Strong claimed to have decrypted the text based on analyzing photostats of two of the VMS folios, which he refers to as Folio 78 and Folio 93. There had already been articles about the manuscript published by John M. Manly and Hugh O’Neill in Speculum, in 1921 and 1944, so he was not starting from a blank slate. Based on its format and illustrations, it was already assumed by the 1940s that it might be an herbal and medical text with a particular emphasis on women’s health.

Strong was eager to publish the medical-related information he felt he had uncovered, but he didn’t explain his solution because he wanted to decode more of the pages and was earnestly trying to acquire more photostats.

Strong claimed the reason he didn’t want to reveal his decryption method was because of “present war conditions”. My guess is that he felt the information in the manuscript, if any of it provided unique insights into medieval remedies, would constitute a treasure trove of publishable articles and if he was the first to decipher it, he could benefit from writing up his discoveries. If he revealed his decryption scheme too soon, others might get the data first.

Despite considerable efforts—that were apparently rebuffed—he never received any additional pages. It has been said that Strong died without revealing his methods, but there are notes to his thought process and if you follow those notes you can puzzle out what he did and where he went wrong and why we are still trying to decode the VMS.

Publications

Strong described some of his findings in an article in Science (June 1945), in which he summarizes the background of the manuscript, including the assumption, by O’Neill (1944) that the manuscript must post-date the journeys of Columbus because the VMS includes New World plants (a theme revived in January 2014 by Tucker and Talbot in HerbalGram).

Strong claimed that the VMS was based on “… a double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet…” and that the VMS author was familiar with ciphers discussed by Trithemius, Porta, and Selenius as well as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s documents. These historic treatises date from the late 1400s to the 1600s, long after the VMS is thought to have been penned.

Strong also claimed that certain of the “peculiar” glyphs in the VMS are mirror images of Italian letters but doesn’t explain exactly which VMS letters he means.

Given that Strong wasn’t very good at reproducing the VMS characters himself (the slants, connections, and pen sequence are mostly wrong), his analysis of what inspired the shapes is questionable—VMS shapes are found in many alphabets, including those around the Mediterranean and those in ancient documents recording dead languages.

Strong made further assumptions about what constitutes the VMS “alphabet”. In his chart, he excluded “j” and “z” and included both “u” and “v”. This works for some languages, but not for others. Clearly his assumptions were already influencing his choice of how the information was encoded, before he had barely begun, and his charts further indicate that he never looked beyond a substitution code, even if approached in a reverse numeric fashion.

Anthony Askham—the VMS Author

Many have criticized Strong’s decryption scheme based on his contention that the author of the VMS is Anthony Askham, an English academic active in the mid-1500s. I think the more important question is whether Strong’s decryption process was viable and accurate. Conjecture about who wrote it can come later and the decryption itself shouldn’t be discounted because the hypothesis about who wrote it may be wrong.

I won’t go through Strong’s entire process here, it’s too long for one article (and there’s no point in detailing a method that doesn’t work), but he created a series of frequency analyses of characters and mapped them to similar analyses of a few European languages and, after assuming which one most closely matched the VMS, he created charts trying to relate various Latin characters to VMS characters for that language, dating each attempt over a series of weeks.

Where Strong Becomes Weak

And now we get to the important part and the reason Strong’s method, already based on a series of possibly incorrect assumptions, doesn’t work. But first, what were the results of his decryption? Here’s a sample of the decrypted text which he describes as medieval English:

WIT SEEK TO EDIT NOT IDLE/IDEL? FOKLUORE FIT ES ME I MEATH TRUNNG IQUERI SELFLI O’ER IT NICLY RUTEN GLAVE QUIR ONGI SEM TE BELI’D

Apparently, Strong was told in no uncertain terms that this was not medieval English and made some later efforts to map the text to Gaelic, apparently without success (or maybe he just gave up).

So why is the text above not medieval English?

To list a few more obvious examples..

They don’t have the word “seek” in Old English. In the sense of searching for something, they say áséc or sēċan ‎or, if you’re seeking out something, you can say gitan or begeten. In old Norse and Dutch it’s søk/soek and German, suchan. In Middle English, sēċan became seken.
Meath isn’t a word, nor is trunng, although -rung was a common suffix in Old English (e.g., clatrung describes a clattering sound).
Iqueri isn’t a word in medieval English. It looks more like Latin and while Latin was often mixed in with Old English, it was not usually done in this way and doesn’t mean anything unless you break it into two words.
Selfli isn’t a word, although self– can be used as a prefix (as in selflicne which can mean self-centered or self-satisfied). If the words around it made sense, you could argue that selfli was an abbreviation for selflicne, but the context doesn’t appear to support this interpretation.

Taken together, there are too many words that aren’t really words, they just look familiar (I’ll explain why below), and the grammar doesn’t pan out either. Even if you evaluate it as “note form” writing, it doesn’t appear to have coherent meaning.

Let’s take another passage, quoted by Strong in his article submission, that seems more credible:

HSAWE-TRE APLE ETTEN VNLICH ARUMS CAN DRAVE WICKS AIR FROM SPLEEN: LIKE SISLE HE DRIS GAS AUT OVARI.

This seems as though it might be real medical information, about eating apples and using arum (which Strong interprets as alum without explaining why it might be alum rather than arum lily) and driving air from one’s spleen as well as driving gas from the ovary.

To understand why this isn’t any more credible than the previous quotation, you have to look at how Strong arrived at these words. Did he really decrypt the letters or did he look at many possible combinations of letters and simply guess, for each individual word, what it might be?

The Madness in the Method

How did Strong arrive at these tokens that look so much like real words?

Once he had a system worked out for mapping the VMS letters to Latin letters, he began evaluating each VMS word-token on its own against a list of “alphabets” he had developed for decipherment. In other words, he had several rows of letters (based on letter frequencies) that each VMS letter might represent. Note the column numbers on the far left. He was saying that A could be any of several VMS glyphs, B could be any of several glyphs, etc., on through the alphabet.

Even if you ignore all of his previous assumptions about language and which glyphs constitute the “alphabet”, and his assumptions about character frequency (based on already deciding on the underlying language), even if all those assumptions were correct, here’s where Strong over-reaches in his eagerness to find meaning in the VMS characters.

Strong created a set of index cards with the possible letter correspondences to each VMS glyph. You can see three of the word-tokens recorded in this example in terms of possible letters from the chart mentioned above.

The first has eight different possible interpretations of the six glyphs in the word token, the second has eight interpretations for five glyphs and the third he wasn’t so sure of (it may comprise less common glyphs) and thus he only proposed five for the five glyphs in the third example.

Under each one is the decrypted word. Strong has written ciphre, swais and lunar. How did he arrive at these? From what I can see, he took a letter from each column and combined them with the others until it became something that looked like a word.

He doesn’t appear to be following a mathematical model even though he described it as a mathematical cipher. In fact, examining all the available index cards, it looks like he inserted letters when he couldn’t create a word in a linear fashion. I have no proof of this, but based on the words noted on 13 index cards, it strongly appears as though his word formation process was subjective. There’s no sign of him uncovering a key, as would be needed for the Porta cypher, or of him necessarily having the alphabetic sequence correct, an important aid in deciphering double ciphers with this structure.

If Strong could come up with a word by using a letter from each column, he did so. If he couldn’t get all of them to work together, he made something up to fill in the gaps. The words themselves surely came from his own vocabulary, since other word combinations are possible but he didn’t list them. For example, a token he interpreted as “childe” (which works for the first three columns but not the remaining two) could also be deciphered as POLLIS, DOGFAR, COWHAG, PURPLO, SOWGAS, LOGLAD, LOWGAS, FORLAG, OWLPAR, or several others, using only the letters listed and not adding anything that isn’t (and that’s only if you look for English-sounding tokens).

The next one, interpreted as YOV (YOU?), can just as easily be read as YOR, TOR, POT, GOT, GLO, PIT, TIT, GOO, POO, or POX using his system, so he’s not only subjectively creating the words, he’s subjectively choosing which, out of many possible words, might fit with the words that precede or follow it and then fitting those into his assumption that the text was about plants and medicine.

It’s easy to assume from the drawings that the text is about medical folklore, and that might be the simplest explanation, but we don’t know for certain if the person who created the drawings also added the text. There are herbals from that period that contain only images, the text was never added, so it’s possible the text was added to the VMS by someone else and is sensitive political commentary or historical, rather than relating to plants. Maybe an unfinished herbal compendium was taken into enemy territory as a ruse (the way a botanist was included in one of the European spying expeditions to the Ottoman palace). Perhaps spy observations were added around the drawings.

Summary

Strong assumed English was the underlying language of the VMS based on creating frequency charts for only a few languages and on the assumption that each VMS glyph represented one character. From that very significant assumption, he tried to create English-sounding words by juggling his letter frequency charts and their derived possible alphabets.

Unfortunately, even with a subjective infusion of natural-sounding syllables, most of the decrypted text is nonsense and none of it fits any known version of medieval English from the 14th to 17th centuries.

Strong will be remembered for his contributions to oncology and the study of genetics in mice, but his status as a cryptographer will have to remain in the amateur category—a hobby, which means we still have a mystery to solve.

J.K. Petersen

On the Bench 3 Feb 2016

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Holding Hands

Bench courtesy of Creation Woods.

There’s a character in the VMS sometimes refered to as the “bench” character. It may seem odd to us, but in medieval documents, this is quite a common ligature, sometimes representing “ce”, sometimes “cr”, sometimes “er”. It depends on the language and the context. It was written as one character to follow the flow of the hand. It also somewhat resembles the Greek letter Pi (although it’s a bit curvier).

No one is certain what it represents in the Voynich manuscript and it’s not entirely clear if it’s a ligature or a character on its own. Sometimes it is plain (as shown above) and sometimes it has a cap (see right). The shape and position of the cap varies quite a bit but the bench underneath tends to behave in fairly consistent ways, ways that are similar to the plain bench.

The bench is a common character. It’s found throughout the manuscript, often multiple times per line, and it is frequently at the beginning of glyph groups. Benches don’t usually sit next to each other, but there are exceptions (right).

Friends on the Bench

The bench glyph has an interesting property that distinguishes it from other shapes. Sometimes it stretches over other characters that are tall, with straight stems, commonly known as “gallows” characters. This creates a combination shape (or perhaps a ligature or a shape with an entirely different meaning).

Sometimes the connection between the left and right sides of the bench is broken and appears to have been intentionally written this way (rather than it being a slip of the pen). There are numerous examples of separated bench characters, but the majority are joined, so it’s difficult to tell whether it’s meant to represent one character or two (or something else). The disconnect happens with both plain and cap benches.

Apparently, the bench can cross any gallows character, although some combinations are less common than others—a bench crossing a one-loop “P” is quite rare.

Sometimes glyph combinations that look similar differ in whether the bench character has a cap.

In some parts of the manuscript (e.g., some of the plant sections), it’s uncommon to see a bench and a gallows-bench next to each other. In other parts, like the bathing nymph sections it’s not uncommon. It was suggested by Capt. Prescott H. Currier that there may be two “languages” (two different glyph-combination systems) underlying the VMS. These have been named Currier A and Currier B.

You can see how frequently benches are used in the example on the left from one of the plant pages. In this small selection of text, there are three gallows benches, two plain benches and a cap bench. Note how several of the bench characters are followed by small c-shaped glyphs. This is a common pattern. Note also that the P-bench and the gallows-bench following it are not usually combined this close together, in the same “word” token.

There’s a curious half-bench that appears in some of the combination glyphs. Sometimes the scribe drew only the left or right side of the bench, but it does appear to be distinct from the curved “c” shape in that the top is longer and straighter than the VMS “c” (sometimes even longer and straighter than this example on the right).

Sometimes the half-bench stretches across a gallows character and attaches itself to another bench on the other side (or perhaps it’s a full bench followed by a half-bench—there’s no way to tell). This long string of cap and plain benches is not common.

There are many bench characters on Folio 1r, including gallows benches, and near the bottom is this character (right) with only the right side of a bench. This half-bench is attached to a cap bench and then what may be another half bench. You have to examine it carefully to try to puzzle out which parts belong to which because the line attaching the two parts of the cap bench is very faint.

I wrote earlier that a bench can only cross a gallows character, and this is generally true, but there are a few rare instances in which a small glyph is inserted under the bench. It looks as though this is intentional since the leg of the gallows character is shifted to the left to make room.

To the right are examples of plain benches followed directly by gallows benches. The glyph combinations of the two words are very similar except for the additional glyph in the character group on the right. This form of repetition, where the following word differs from the previous by only one character (either by changing a character, or by adding or subtracting one) happens frequently in the VMS and is one of the reasons people have questioned whether there is sense or nonsense underlying the unusual glyphs.

Are There Other Bench Oddities?

There is a very different bench (right), in the naked nymphs section, that stands out as fractured, globby, and unconventional. There are anomalies in the VMS that suggest someone may have tampered with several parts of the manuscript, so it’s possible this bench-gallows, which is at the end of a line, was added by someone else and may not mean anything at all.

Convenient to Write or a Different Character?

Is the bench character a ligature, a combination character, or a convenient way to write a sequence with less movement of the hand?

I found this intriguing example on the right that has a plain bench on either side of the gallows but does not cross the gallows. If it’s intentional that there are two separate benches enclosing the gallows-P without crossing it (and not misdirection or a lapse of habit) then it might suggest that the stretched bench represents something other than a quick way to write a gallows with a bench on either side.

One of the difficulties in trying to crack the Voynich code is determining how much meaning might be attached to each shape. If you’re not sure whether a shape represents one, two, three, or more characters (or concepts), then creating algorithms in your mind or on a computer entails a lot more trial and error.

I’ll leave you to ponder that example and decide whether the dynamics of the bench character can help us better understand the VMS “alphabet”.

J.K. Petersen

Curiosity Shop or Little Shop of Horrors? 30 Jan. 2016

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A Treasure Trove on a Single Page

I wasn’t sure what to title this blog because it’s not clear what is going on at the bottom of Folio 66r. Is this a murder mystery? Is that a dead body?

Audrey the ailing plant begs for blood in Little Shop of Horrors, courtesy of Warner Brothers, 1986.

In fact, Folio 66r is unusual in many ways. Not only is there a mystery pic at the bottom, with some altered text beside it, but the upper left is full of character glyphs that differ from the majority of the text in both shape and position.

Since there are enough head-scratchers on this page to fill several blogs (perhaps several papers), I’ll start with the image and marginal text at the bottom. It might be a mistake to describe it out of context with the text at the top but, since we haven’t deciphered the big block of text, maybe it’s okay to start with the picture.

What is Going On Here?

It’s possible the Voynich Manuscript is a medical text, with a particular emphasis on women’s health. It is full of plants (plants were medicine in the Middle Ages), nude ladies bathing, women’s cycles, and stylized drawings of internal body parts.

On Folio 66r, there is a figure in the lower left, presumably female, with a distorted stomach and an oddly curved back. The back might be some excess poundage or maybe some swelling. It may also be an example of weak drawing skills.

The bottom of the stomach is sticking out in an oddly irregular way, compared to the round bellies in other parts of the manuscript. Nearby are three objects: a spotty irregular mass that resembles a sponge but could be almost anything, a rounder spotted object (a lid? a rock? a rounded tuber?), and what might be a container of some kind (it has lines on it like a woven basket, but it’s very hard to tell—it could be a bucket, a cup, or a chamber pot).

Dead or Alive?

Is this prostrate figure a corpse? Or a figure looking toward us, with eyes open? Is it the face of distress or someone lying on a board waiting to be examined? Is she pinching her stomach? With so few details, it’s difficult to tell.

The face of the woman is faded, as though the quill were running out of ink, but it looks like the eyes might be open, and her right arm seems to be pinching and pulling the stomach, so maybe it isn’t a dead body after all—it might be someone in distress. Assuming for the moment that the prostate figure is alive (and female), what could be causing a problem?

Stomach ache?
Dysentery? (King Henry V is said to have died of dysentery in 1422)
Injury?
Appendicitis?
Menstrual cramps?
Childbirth pains?
Post-partem distress?

I hate to suggest abortion, because it’s always a touchy subject, but we have to consider this possibility. In medieval times, many girls, from peasants to royalty, were sold off as wives in their mid-teens and sometimes endured fourteen or more pregnancies when they scarcely had food to feed two or three mouths and, if their husbands were soldiers, the breadwinner was frequently away from home burning and pillaging, leaving the women to cope with the household and children alone.

They were turbulent times. People were hung, dragged behind horses, burned at the stake, castrated, and drawn and quartered in the public square, where even the smallest child could sit and watch. Explicit examples of these procedures were recorded by 15th century artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio (right).

Given this attitude toward life and death, abortion was a very common occurrence and abortifacient plants are mentioned in many herbal manuscripts, sometimes euphemistically as, “a plant that encourages courses” (“courses” meaning menstrual bleeding).

Maybe the other objects can shed some light on what’s happening to the recumbent figure.

Perhaps the explanation is simple—the naked damsel might have a tummy ache. The irregular mass could be an unfortunate consequence of diarrhea, or it might be the afterbirth following pregnancy and childbirth. Maybe it’s a tumor or cyst (surgery has been around since Egyptian times and even Caesarian sections were performed in centuries past).

Note that images of children are conspicuously absent in the VMS. If you consider it’s full of cavorting naked women and women in various stages of pregnancy, it’s surprising there are no offspring. It does show a few girls on the cusp of puberty in the zodiac wheels, but they are included to show the beginning of the maturation process and very young children are not shown.

Men are not completely absent from the VMS. There are illustrations of men both clothed and naked, and details of body parts engaged in ejaculatory activity, as in the left margin of Folio 77v. If the drawing on 66r is a reference to childbirth, it would not be out of place.

What’s the Yellow Stuff in the Bucket?

If you look closely, you’ll note that the inside of the bucket (assuming it’s some kind of container) is a pale golden color. Maybe it was painted this way to make it look three dimensional and there’s nothing in the bucket, but there’s a splotch on the woman’s stomach that seems to match, so perhaps there’s a connection between the two.

It’s difficult to tell from a digital scan if the spot on the stomach is a natural discoloration in the page (it matches the ragged yellow edge of the parchment on the right) or is intended to refer to the contents of the bucket, but let’s assume it was painted there.

Urine chart illustrating different possible colors, Wellcome Library, London. Epiphaniae medicorum, Pinder, Ulrich, 1506

Could the substance be a salve to relieve distress, or a reference to something going on inside the belly? Is the yellowish color urine?

Diagnosis with urine specimens was a hot topic in medieval circles. Many herbal compendiums include wheels showing beakers filled with liquid in a range of colors. When urine was reddish, dark brown, or even purple, it was assumed some disease or internal malfunction might be present, but the substance in the VMS bucket is the color of healthy urine so it seems unlikely it relates to someone lying down, pulling on her belly.

Maybe it’s not urine; maybe it’s something used to treat disease or injury. Medieval pharmaceutical recipes often recommended mixing oil, wine, or honey with herbs for making ointments for external use, or potions for internal use. Assuming white wine rather than red, all of these might be a pale yellowish color. So how do we know? There might be a clue. If you look at the text above the container (which has been altered, but which may have originally read “mel”), then you have the word for honey that was commonly used in herbal manuscripts.

Which brings us to the text. Can the text help us understand the puzzling image?

Did the Right Hand Know What the Left Hand Was Doing?

There are a few places in the Voynich Manuscript where we see marginal text in a Gothic cursive hand, separate from the main text. Normally Voynichese and marginal text are not combined, but there are some instances where it happens, as on Folios 116v (right) and 17r. This only deepens the VMS mystery. Do different hands represent different people? Or did the VMS scribe write the marginal notes as well?

On 66r, the two forms of script are not intermingled, but there are definitely two different scripts—Voynichese above the drawing, and Gothic cursive (or something close to it) above the bucket. We don’t know which was added first, but the drawing was possibly there before the Voynichese was added, as the tail of the glyph next to the head looks like it has been shortened so the tail doesn’t clobber the head.

Looking at the text on the left, I can’t interpret the lonely letter at the top because it’s halfway between an “r” and a “v” as they were written at the time, or perhaps it’s the Greek ypsilon.

The text by the bucket is similar to the Germanic hand on Folios 17r and 116v.

As with the other marginal texts in the VMS, this one is difficult to read, but ignoring the over-writing, it looks like “ven muß mel” in Germanic or a mixture of Germanic and Latin.

It’s tempting to interpret this as “when one should use honey” or “in this situation one must use honey”. This assumes the first letter in the bottom word was an “m” before it was obscured.

In modern German, honey is “honig” but in the 15th century, throughout Lombardy, France, Italy, and Greece, variations on “mel” included meile, melle, meli, etc., and were used to notate honey in herbal documents, plus most scribes knew Latin, in which honey is “mel”. Honey is frequently mentioned in herbal compendiums in combination with Artemisia, Viola, garlic, and horehound. Examples of honey recipes can be seen in Ms. Egerton 747 and many others.

What about that first word of “ven muß mel”? Could it be something besides an old Germanic reference to “when”? Is it possible it relates to the old Anglo-Saxon word for swelling which is “wen” or “wenn”? Then the phrase might mean, “honey should be used for a swelling” (note that in German, a “w” is pronounced as a “v” in English).

Honey as Traditional Medicine

Honey was used as traditional medicine at least as early as Egyptian times. In the Ebers Papyrus of c.1550 BCE, which was found between the legs of a mummy, are passages about women’s health, with honey mentioned as a base for salves for treating wounds and other disorders.

An even earlier document, called the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, dating from c.1800 BCE, is specifically devoted to women’s health.

Here are some examples of medical recipes from the Ebers and Kahun papyri related to complaints of the belly, or conception and childbirth:

A paste of honey and yellow ochre was suggested for intestinal or urological complaints.
“For the evacuation of the belly: Cow’s milk 1; grains 1; honey 1; mash, sift, cook; take in four portions.”
“To prevent conception, smear a paste of dates, acacia, and honey to wool and apply as a pessary.”
Another recipe for contraception was a paste of crocodile dung, honey, and sour milk (hopefully the document also includes a treatment for crocodile and leech bites).
“hin of honey, sprinkle over her womb, this to be done on natron bed”

Herbal traditions in ancient Rome included honey as a barrier method to contraception. Mixed with sodium carbonate to create a paste, it was used to cover the cervix.

Medieval Use of Honey

In the Wellcome library there’s an interesting 11th century folio that was preserved in a book from the 9th century, in which medical recipes have been added in more than one hand, apparently by monks. Here is a translation of a section that mentions honey as a treatment for “wenns” (which can mean either tumors or swellings):

To make yourself an ointment for tumours [wenns], one shall take pure honey, such as is used to lighten porridge, boil it to almost the thickness of porridge; take radish, elder, wild thyme, cinquefoil, pound them as well as you can; and when it is almost done mix in a good measure of garlic and put to it as much pepper as you think.
A salve against tumours, water cucumber, a handful of spearmint, dittany, woodwax, mulberry; boil in malt-ale; squeeze through a linen cloth, boil in honey-droppings; take then clean spring barley, grind (it) in a handmill; then take madder, dry it in (an oven); grind a handful of red-cabbage seed in a peppermill; boil all together, not too hard. Use it three times a week, as is most convenient.
This salve is good for tumours and for the bleeding of piles. But it should be stirred up, lest it should be spoiled.

Summary

Preparing honey in an Arabic version of De Materia Medica from c.621 AD

The use of honey for belly complaints or gynecological purposes has been passed down for thousands of years and was not new to medieval physicians and midwives. Oils and wines were also used for tonics and salves, but it’s harder to reconcile those with the word “mel” appearing above the bucket.

We don’t know if the label in another hand accurately represents the drawing (or possibly a translation of the text above the drawing). Maybe the person who wrote the marginal notes was guessing, just as we are, but if it’s the same writer who added notations to f77r and f116v, it’s possible he had some knowledge of what was in the VMS.

Until we can decode the rest of the text, the purpose and contents of the bucket will remain a mystery and the status of the woman uncertain, but it’s reasonable to think it might be honey, and that’s a more pleasant note to end on than some of the other possibilities.

J.K. Petersen

A Prickly Pear-adigm 28 Jan 2016

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Eureka I Think I’ve Found It

Every few months, someone claims to have decoded the baffling text of the Voynich Manuscript. Many eager code-breakers seem to think it’s enough to crack the door a couple of inches and let others do the actual work of decrypting it according to their revelatory method. To date, no one has published even two paragraphs of text that can be generalized to the document as a whole and some have offered only a few words that have yielded not even a single decrypted sentence.

Even methods that show promise are applied to the inscrutable text in inconsistent ways or result in text that doesn’t have the flow of natural language and can be interpreted according to whim rather than to an objective standard. Until someone describes a method that can be adapted by others and generalized to at least a few pages, the VMS text remains unsolved.

When the Tail Wags the Dog

I’ve never made any assumptions about where the VMS was created or by whom. I look for trails and follow them wherever they happen to lead and, if they run cold, I look for another and follow that. Thus, it surprised me that Edith and Erica Sherwood made this statement several years ago on their Voynich site with regard to plant identifications:

“Acting on the premise that the Voynich Manuscript is a 15th century Italian manuscript, we limited our selection to plants native to Europe or at least the old world and excluded all plants from the Americas.”

Photo courtesy of Alex Proimos

It’s entirely possible that the VMS originated in Italy, and maybe it makes sense to start in the most likely locale, but why begin with a limited set of data when you are in the information-gathering stage? It’s possible the Sherwoods had a good reason for limiting their search for plants, maybe they knew something about the VMS that others didn’t, but my feeling is that if you’re starting out, it’s sometimes better to cast a wide net and let the data lead you rather than putting artificial constraints on the search.

There are times when it makes sense to impose limitations, if the scope of a problem is intractable due to time or resources, but identifying plants isn’t an intractable problem. Botanists do it every day, often with plants for which the origin is unknown. If you choose to keyhole your research, do it in a reasonable way or someone will come along and upset the apple cart like this…

A New World Origin

One of the more interesting ideas on the origin of the VMS was offered by Arthur O. Tucker, botanist, and Rexford H. Talbert, an information technologist with an interest in chemistry and botany. Tucker and Talbert’s 2013 paper was published in the American Botanical Council’s journal, the HerbalGram. A New World origin was proposed, with the suggestion that an extinct form of the Nahuatl language underlay the text.

16th c Codex Badianus, a New World Herbal compendium

This is a cool idea, if you consider someone trying to write a 16th century Aztec language with Latin characters might make up new characters to represent sounds not found in Spanish or Latin. That the VMS could have been created somewhere other than Europe is a reasonable hypothesis. The VMS was found in a Jesuit library and missionaries (Jesuit, Franciscan, Benedictine and others) were often the first to set up schools and housing in new colonies in both the far east and the west, and a number of them were interested in recording natural history. It’s also reasonable to consider that the text and drawings in the VMS might have been added to the parchment years after the parchment was prepared. There may even be small caches of centuries-old parchment that remain unused.

Pinning Down that Pesky Date

Aztec Sun Stone Calender, discovered in 1790, Mexican National Museum of Anthropology.

Radiocarbon dating is a very good scientific tool and has been greatly improved since it was first introduced. Scientists rarely use carbon dating by itself to determine the age of a document, they look at many factors (often hundreds of clues are considered together before estimating a date) but even by itself, carbon dating can sometimes yield useful information.

When the VMS style of drawing and writing, the cultural references in the pictures, the ink, parchment preparation, carbon dating, and other factors are taken into consideration, they point to the early 15th century. The Voynich Manuscript probably wasn’t created earlier than that (you can’t write on vellum/parchment that is still on the hoof), but there is a possibility that it was created later than the estimated dates, if the parchment (and ink) sat for a while before being used. Ink doesn’t last as long as parchment, it will dry out if exposed to air, but even ink can be stored for a couple of decades (maybe longer) in glass containers with good stoppers.

Carbon dating narrowed down the origin of the materials used to create the VMS to between 1404 and 1438. Interestingly, radiocarbon dating on the famous Vinland map (a Nordic map of the New World) dates it to the early 15th century as well.

Like the Voynich Manuscript, the Vinland map has been called a hoax, especially as it appears to have been created about four centuries after the original Viking voyages to the New World, but it’s also possible it is a copy of an older map that was passed down after the original voyages and may yet have some historical importance. Whether the VMS is historically important beyond being a curiosity depends in part on how much, if any, of the text can be deciphered.

It’s not practical to apply radiocarbon dating to every page of the manuscript, but the results from the samples were quite consistent. Whether the VMS was a short- or long-term project is difficult to assess. There are some puzzling anomalies in the text and illustrations that suggest it may have been created by more than one person. Perhaps it was begun in one decade and finished in another. But is it possible that it was created a century later than the ink and parchment, the clothing styles, and the style of drawing suggest? Except for some exploratory pillaging and slaughter of indigenous people in the late 1490s, the New World wasn’t colonized by Europeans until the 16th century. Could the VMS have been created later than the journeys of Columbus?

Herbal Tradition and New World Plants

The Codex Badianus text was written in Nahuatl expressed with Latin characters

The first New World herbal manuscript that has survived to the present day is the Codex Badanius, written in Nahuatl, in 1552, by Martinus de la Cruz, a physician at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco. The Voynich text even looks a bit like Nahuatl, which has some linguistic rules that create a higher level of repetition than is characteristic of English.

English has many loan words from other languages, including old Norse and French. In fact, in the 15th century, a number of words in Middle English were spoken as they were in old Norse. Nahuatl gives the impression of being more homogenous than English (as Korean was before Chinese commercial terms and English computer terms began interfering with the internal consistency of the language). As cultures mingle, the basic “logic” of a language gets lost in the jumble of new words.

So what is the connection between the Voynich Manuscript and Spanish colonies at the southwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico?

In their paper, Tucker and Talbert state that they were

“… initially drawn to plant No. 8 of the 16 plants on folio 100r; this is obviously a cactus pad or fruit, i.e.g, Opuntia spp., quite possibly Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill. (Cactaceae) or a related species. Thus, is quite easily transliterated as nashti, a variant of nochtli, the Nahuatl (Aztec) name for the fruit of the prickly pear cactus or the cactus itself.”

A Thorny Conundrum

Based on their assertion that plant f100r–8 (right) was obviously a cactus, I consulted folio 100r and immediately questioned how so little information could result in such a definite ID. Given the limited artistic skills of the VMS illustrator, it could be many things and this plant didn’t look spiny to me, it looks knobby.

I was also curious as to how the VMS text next to the plant “easily transliterated” as nashtl. If this says nashtl, why can’t we translate the other plant names on the page using the same system of substitution? How do the researchers know this is a label for the plant rather than an instruction for processing it or perhaps a word to indicate which part of the plant is used? Maybe the text has nothing to do with the plant.

I also recalled there being a plant with a similar leaf structure on another page and sought out Plant 26r for comparison with f100r–8. It has somewhat pear-shaped leaves with regularly spaced, rounded protrusions. The margins are drawn darker than the plant on f100r and the area between the big bumps isn’t as ragged, but the essential shape of the leaf is similar.

There are other instances in the VMS where a smaller version of a larger plant can be found in the sections near the end of the manuscript, so it’s possible that the same plant might appear in two places. I’ve added the plant from f100r to 26r so you can see the similar shapes of the leaves. They’re not identical, but they’re close enough to propose that they might be the same plant and if they are, this is definitely not a cactus plant. It has a slender stem, long petioles, and flowers on long spikes. This plant would wither and die in a desert environment.

Even if Plant 26r and f100–8 are different plants, I think Plant 26r demonstrates that a pear-shaped leaf with protrusions can be something other than a cactus plant.

Summary

Cactus plant symbolically representing Mexico in the Codex Osuna, with Nahuatl in Latin script underneath.The Aztecs had a pictorial written language prior to colonization by Spanish-speaking Europeans, so the sounds were transliterated into the Latin alphabet and taught to young Aztec boys.

I’m not going to go through the Tucker and Talbert arguments point-by-point because it would be too long for a single blog post, but I’ll leave you to read their article, if you haven’t already (it’s an interesting read), and to think about whether the VMS plants are accurate and specific enough to say whether they correspond to New World or Old World plants.

Also, make note of Tucker’s statement about how botany students tend to draw by emphasizing the parts they particularly notice. This is something I’ve observed in a more general sense, as well, and it may explain some of the more bizarre physical traits of some of the VMS plants.

There were similar plants growing in both Eurasia and the New World in the 15th century, including violas, ivy, plantain, saxifrages, St. John’s wort, sundews, water lilies, terrestrial lilies, alliums (onions), loosestrife, chicory, wild lettuce, dodder, juniper, calendula, and solanum (nightshade). Whether the VMS represents New or Old World plants (or both) is still up for debate. I’m leaning toward Old World based on studying the plants for a couple of years, but if the plant that looks like Ricinus (an Old World plant) turned out to be a New World chestnut tree, for example, that would have a substantial impact on our understanding of the VMS.

J.K. Petersen

Sirens, Sailors and the Lovely Melusina 25 Jan 2016

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The Lure of Mythical Creatures

We are fascinated by mysteries—the glimpse through a keyhole, a whisper behind the door, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, the Loch Ness monster, unicorns, fairies and the Voynich Manuscript.

Lady and the Unicorn tapestry. Courtesy of the Cluny Museum.

We also have a propensity for mutating our favorite myths into something more glamorous than their original models. Hence the cloven-hooved goat—the original unicorn—becomes a silvery horned horse and the horse, already a fleet animal, becomes even fleeter when it takes to the skies on Pegasus wings.

The Water Sprite Who Desired a Mortal Existence

The legend of the melusine, a fairy with scaly legs, was passed down through oral history with certain monstrous characteristics not unlike those of the serpent in the Garden of Eden or the sirens of the seas, but also with qualities of beauty and sincerity and, in later retellings, of maternal devotion. Her union with a mortal resulted in children with defects, yet she and her husband loved them all.

The legendary half water-sprite, half mortal, was sometimes shown as serpent, sometimes as fish, but was usually distinguished from mermaids and sirens by being a fresh-water fairy or sprite, rather than a temptress of salt waters. Not always, however. It depends who is telling the story. In coastal locations, the melusine sometimes comes from the sea or, in others, Mélusina is a fresh-water sprite but her mother was a salt-water siren.

In the story, Raymond is wandering disconsolate through the forest because he accidentally shot an arrow through his host while aiming at a boar and can’t go back because he will be charged with murder. Unexpectedly he hears a sweet singing voice and is enticed by a lovely sprite by a fountain and she, in turn, falls for Raymond, a mortal of noble blood. Unfortunately, his fate is insecure and his material prospects not too bright, so Mélusina helps him avoid the gallows and attain his desires, and gives herself to him on the stern promise that he never watch her on Saturdays, the day that she bathes. Raymond readily agrees.

Mélusine and Raymondin in Marital Bliss

Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg

At first, Mélusine’s husband honored his promise and they had a happy union. She furthered their fortunes by clearing land and building castles. But first Raymondin needed to acquire the land, so he asked for as much land as would fit on a hide. Laughing, a nobleman granted his wish—how much land can fit on a hide? But the clever Mélusine instructed Raymond to cut the hide into long fine traces that would stretch for miles and surround a good bit of property. Then she blessed him with numerous children.

Being a mixture of mortal and fairy blood, the children were robust but born with unsightly disfigurements. Nevertheless, their parents loved them dearly and the family grew large.

Mélusine in her bath. Book of Hours of Duc de Berry, 1392/1393.

Then a zealous (or perhaps jealous) brother put a bug in Raymond’s ear to erode his faith in his wife and convinced him to find out what she was doing behind his back. So Raymond spied on her during her bath and discovered she had the legs of a serpent.

Mélusina cried out in anguish at his betrayal and he swooned when he realized she had done no wrong and that his actions had doomed her to spend eternity in an uneasy spirit world.

In some versions, she disappears into netherlife with the children, in others, she stays but the children spiral downward into unspeakable acts and Raymond blames her because she is an unnatural creature. Either way, the trust is broken and the relationship irrevocably destroyed.

1401, ilustración tomada de la Historia de Melusina, del trovador Codrette, París, Biblioteca Nacional de Francia

Mélusina with her numerous children from Historia de Melusina, by Couldrette, París, 1401, Courtesy of Biblioteca Nationale de Francaise..

Written Versions. The legend of the melusine, passed down through oral history, was popularized in Roman de Mélusina, written for Jean, duc de Berry and Guillaume l’Archèvesque by Jean d’Arras in 1392/93. In 1401, it was retold in verse by Couldrette, with Mélusine depicted not only with a serpentine lower body, but also bird legs and wings.

The story spread through textual and illustrated manuscripts across Lombardy through the 14th and 15th centuries. A “mermaid” illustrated on land, keeping company with her children or being spied upon in a bath isn’t a mermaid at all, it’s a melusine, a water sprite. Mélusine is sometimes shown combing her hair in the bath when she is discovered by her husband, but she is not typically shown with a mirror.

Mermaid, Melusine or other Mythical Creature?

In the Hunterian Psalter, an ecclesiastical manuscript of the early 12th century, “Psalm 89” has been illuminated with an initial of a long-haired man or woman with a comb, climbing out from a scaly tail. There’s not enough context to know if it’s a reference to the legend of Mélusine—a story of faith, trust, and betrayal—or to something else. There are a couple of mentions of the sea and other water in the verse, but they are not central to the words of Ethan, the Ezrahite, who rebukes God for making and breaking a promise and cries out, “Lord, where is your former great love, which in your faithfulness you swore to David?”

There is also a mermaid-like creature in the Voynich Manuscript, at the bottom of Folio 79v—half-woman, half-fish, immersed in a pool of green water. Except, like the embellished initial, it’s not one creature but two—a woman with regular legs and what looks like a spotted fish with two eyes and an unusual mouth. You almost expect to see a zipper. The mouth looks more like a costume than a natural fish, especially if you consider the rest of the fish looks more natural than many drawings of mermaid tails. I wondered sometimes if this were a variation of the Noah’s arc tale, but somehow it doesn’t feel that way to me.

Without the text, it’s difficult to explain this creature or the tube-like drawings up along the left side, or the other critters on the right side of the pool but I believe there are some important clues on this page and that the fish-woman may relate to the tale of the melusine, either directly or indirectly.

Similar Story and Illustrative Traditions

Das Buch der Natur, Lauber Workshop, Hagenau, Alsace, c.1440s

A few years ago, I began tracing the script styles on the last page of the VMS and discovered some illustrations, accompanied by Gothic Cursive text, that were hauntingly similar to the “mermaid” page in the VMS.

Even though the mer-creatures aren’t the same as the VMS woman-in-fish creature, the way the animals were drawn and the pigments used, have many commonalities. I’m fairly certain it’s not the same artist—the water is always drawn differently, as is the fish-like creature in the VMS version, and the parchment of the commercial document appears smoother than the VMS—but otherwise, except for the obvious difference in drawing skills, they are so similar, it’s tempting to wonder if the two illustrators might be related in some way or if the VMS illustrator were somehow connected to the workshop by friendship or by blood.

First notice the pigments—simple greens, blues, bluffs, and browns, quite subdued compared to Spanish and French illuminations of the time that included vibrant blues, greens, and golds.

In addition to the limited palette, note the indistinct way the animals are drawn—you can’t quite tell what they are. This is also true of the critters on Folio 79v. They are not quite a dog, a lion, or a fox and the creature below the fish tail doesn’t quite resemble a lizard or salamander, either, not with that kinky tail.

Now, if you inspect the illustration of the “melusine” from Das Buch der Natur (note the serpent’s tail rather than a fish tail) and look closely at that little creature caught up in the tail on the top right you might note its resemblance to one of the VMS critters. Also note these details:

the little animal has a happy face,
the tail belongs to the melusine, not the little animal, and
the VMS critter (which I have rotated to make it easier to see the similarities), has the tail originally drawn, but then painted over.

This painted-over tail is likely a coincidence (rather than a sign that the VMS illustrator may have copied and corrected the little critter) as Das Buch der Natur probably post-dates the VMS by as much as 20 or 30 years, but is it possible that both the VMS and Das Buch der Natur were taken from a common source? The workshop that created Buch der Natur is thought to descend from a similar workshop that operated in the early 15th century (one with a more formal and traditional illumination and script style but in the same region).

Also, note an even more important detail that I mentioned in my 2013 post on the zodiac symbols—the VMS illustrator had difficulty drawing hind legs.

Look again at Taurus and Aries. The illustrator doesn’t quite get that the “elbows” of the hind joints point backward rather than straight down or forward, an anatomical detail that is usually drawn correctly in medieval manuscripts and which is semi-flubbed in the VMS.

In Das Buch der Natur, we find this same quirk! In both drawings, the hind quarters are indistinct and ambiguously drawn—the illustrators apparently can’t envision the inner structure of the bones and joints even though the other parts aren’t drawn too badly. In fact the illustrator on the right drew a pretty good face.

Summing Up

So what does all this mean?

Pigment and writing traditions can sometimes help identify a place of origin as can the way parchment is obtained and prepared. The palette and writing style on the last page closely match those of Das Buch der Natur. The VMS main text doesn’t match anything that can be specifically identified and we don’t know if the person who did the drawings and the person who added the text are the same.

It’s not certain whether the woman in the fish (if it is a fish) is separate from the fish or allegorically related to the fish, but the drawing could be derived from one of the popular legends at the time, especially considering there are other critters on the same page that evoke the same “feel” as the critters in Das Buch der Natur.

Maybe the woman on Folio 79v is a melusine donning her fishtail during her Saturday bath, or maybe there’s no connection to mythical creatures at all. I think we can say, however, that it’s probably not a mermaid, since the fish and woman appear to be separate creatures, and there’s no sign of a mirror as seen in most pictures of mermaids.

J.K. Petersen

Marginal Notes and Miniscule Text 26 Jan 2016

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There’s Something About Mariolli Folio F17r

If you look at Folio F17r, it’s laid out like many of the other plant pages. There’s a colored plant, a block of text that flows around the plant, and a marginal note at the top. If it weren’t for the marginal note, the page would probably not attract much attention.

By itself, the marginal note isn’t especially unusual. Notes are found elsewhere, in the same apparent handwriting, but… there’s something about the text that is different and some incongruities in the marginal note worth exploring, as well.

Normally I would describe the text first, and then talk about the marginal note, but I’m doing it it the other way around because there’s more than one mystery on this page and one may help illuminate the other.

Mallior Allor?

When I’m investigating marginal notes, I try not to look at other people’s interpretations until I’m fairly sure of what it looks like to me and what I think it might mean. Then I begin to wonder if others have come to the same conclusion and I start scouting around. In this case, my idea differed from most (perhaps all) of the others, at least in part.

This is what the note looks like after I adjusted it in Photoshop to try to make it clearer:

I confess I didn’t look at other analyses for very long, but this is what I discovered about other researchers’ interpretations…

Some consider the note unreadable.
Some say it’s in cipher text.
Some have suggested it is connected to Mattioli or Matthiolaus.
René Zandbergen, in 1999, suggested mallior adlor lucz(m) her vnllomnis olio**
Some say it’s Latin

I quickly stopped looking at other theories. I can’t see anything that evokes Mattioli or Matthiolaus in this text. I don’t think it’s cypher text, at least not the first part. Zandbergen’s suggestion makes more sense than any of the others, but I have some ideas that differ somewhat.

The Handwriting Style

First, some background. The margin note is in the same style of script used on the last page and some of the other marginal notes. This style of script emerged in the late 1300s and was just about gone by the late 1500s due to the invention of printing presses. Just as Carolingian had its day, this form of Germanic text, which was particularly prevalent in southeast Germany in the early 1400s, declined and died. During its height, it was mainly used for Latin and German religious texts and chronicles, although a slight variant was also used in certain monasteries in England and another variant in northeastern France.

I mentioned in a previous article that part of the reason this form of script became popular was because there was a businessman in southern Germany running a manuscript studio (see example right) who earned extra cash by teaching handwriting to children (and probably anyone else who was willing to pay). This style of script was also shared in ecclesiastical settings in the St. Gall area.

I tried to trace the earliest example of this style of writing and I’m not sure I have the earliest, but there is a possibility it originated in Naples or that someone from Germany visited Naples and brought it back in the 14th century, or may have learned the script in Germany, then traveled to Naples before writing the manuscript. Naples was a Lombardic kingdom until the 8th century but it’s probably Charles III or Ladislavs I who was King of Naples at the time this document was created.

The example to the right originated in the early 15th century, about a decade before the one from the German workshop. It’s a heavier hand (a wider quill) than the spindly writing of the VMS margin-writer, but it’s the same style of writing and differs quite noticeably from most mid- and southern Italian writing of the time.

So, it appears that the margin notes are Germanic. Combine this with the sprinkling of Germanic words and it’s hard not to posit a Germanic influence on the handwriting style.

Most Lombardic scribes at the time wrote in both Latin and German and the marginal-notes writer is no exception. The last page includes both Latinesque and some almost-discernible Germanic words. The smaller marginal notes on other pages are a mixture of German and Latin with Latin scribal abbreviations and I’m somewhat sure that the marginal notes on this page are the same.

Don’t Keep us in Suspense… What Does it Say?

I’m fairly sure the note at the top is polyglot, just as I’m somewhat sure the text on the last page is polyglot. That’s not to say it was polyglot at the time. German was infused with Frankish words, Norman languages included a mixture of German, French, and old Norse, old Flemish existed somewhere between Latin, French, and Dutch, and most educated people knew Latin. Germanic script typically used a subset of Latin scribal abbreviations.

To start, I don’t think that first loopy letter is an “o” as has been suggested by many people. I think it’s an “e” mainly because many scribes wrote the letter “e” this way with hardly any tick mark to distinguish it from a “c”. Note how it slants more than an “o” and it doesn’t close all the way. The last letter of the first word is “r” as is the last letter of the next word. The “r” shapes are standard Germanic script of the time.

Here is my current guess at what it says. The “a” is messy, the second “e” or “o” is up for debate, but the other letters are discernible:

mallier aller lucorem hov vi[ ]lameno ?? o? no/uo ?? olono?? (I cannot make out the end of it where it fades.)

Notice I expanded the Latin lucorum. The line above the cz means letters are left out—this was a common way to abbreviate a word. It can also be abbreviated with a -rum symbol that looks a bit like an embellished “4”. See my previous article about Latin abbreviations.

So… what is mallier?

It would mean nothing to most people, even to many Europeans, but to a Norman, it could be understood as “to paint” in a mixture of Scandinavian with French pronunciation (even if it’s not French grammatical structure). Most languages use some form of the word “paint” (to mean coloring in something) but in German, it can be malen and in Norse, it’s “male” (it’s well to remember that Normandy derives from “Nor maend” (Men of the North, Norse men). Mallier could be a “verbized” form of “to paint”.

The next word aller or allor would be understood by most northern German or Scandinavians of the time as “all [of the]”. In Latin lucorem hov would refer to these things as green. I’m not absolutely sure it’s “hov” as the last letter is badly obscured but it might be.

Is it reasonable to believe that the marginal text could be instructions? I think it’s possible, given that there are annotations elsewhere in the same style of writing that could be interpreted that way and are added in a manner consistent with other herbal manuscripts. Consider that the “g” in the leaf of Plant 1v, the “por” (purple?) on the petals of the viola, and the “rot” on the stem of Plant 4r might be painting instructions, as well.

I am guessing that the statement could be an instruction as in, “paint all these green” except that the word after hov is probably part of the statement as in, “paint all these ___[leaves? plants? a shade of green?]___ green “. Unfortunately, I cannot make out the next word but it has a peculiarity that needs to be mentioned in the context of the whole page.

Is That a Slip of the Pen or Something Else?

The first two letters of the fading word look like vi but the next doesn’t appear to match any known Latin/Germanic character. Maybe it was a slip of the pen and was meant to be something like rt, but it keeps teasing me into thinking it’s a mini-gallows character. What follows after these shapes is difficult to discern, maybe -lamino or something like that but I haven’t succeeded in making it out.

But getting back to that possible gallows character. I rejected the idea several times, because gallows characters are tall. It’s hard to hang someone from the height of a footstool so it makes no sense to interpret it as a gallows character, does it?

Remember I mentioned at the beginning of this article that there’s something odd about this page? Well guess what.. when I tired of staring at the faded letters, my eye drifted down the page and landed on, I couldn’t believe it, a tiny gallows character. Right there on the same page, on line seven! How improbable is that?

It’s very small, able to shelter under the arm of a full-sized gallows character and yet, despite its diminutive size, even has a tiny tick mark on the bottom foot that is characteristic of this symbol.

It’s hard to describe how surprised I was. As implausible as it seemed, at first, maybe there is a gallows character buried in the marginal note, just as there are VMS characters mixed in with Latin and German on the last page.

Summary

There’s more to say about this page, but I’ll do that in another article. For now, I’m throwing out an alternate suggestion for the marginal text that differs from what I’ve seen so far in the hopes of furthering the discussion about what it might mean.

I wish I could see the Cheshire-cat text through a microscope—like everything else Voynichese, it’s a terrible tease.

J.K. Petersen

Little Details that Loom Large 29 Jan 2016

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Has Someone Messed with the Voynich Manuscript?

This question has often been asked, along with assertions that the entire document is a hoax. It took scientific analysis to establish that the text was probably added in the early 15th century rather than centuries later by Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who acquired the document from a Jesuit cache.

Even if all the text were written in the early 1400s, that still doesn’t guarantee it was all done by one hand. It has been suggested a number of times that several people contributed to the VMS.

There are at least three styles of handwriting: 1) the main text (one hand or possibly more), 2) the marginalia and last page, and 3) the labels under the zodiac symbols.

Analysis suggests there may be two underlying “languages” or patterns to the text, as well. But what about the handwriting itself?

That’s a long subject and probably should be released as a paper rather than a blog article, but there’s an interesting example on one of the plant pages that certainly looks like someone has altered the original text by adding extra characters.

The Voynich “Style”

Before illustrating the unusual text, it’s necessary to look at how letters are normally formed in the VMS. I’ll use a specific character as an example, taken from the same page as the anomalous characters.

There is a glyph that somewhat resembles a leaning “r” with a backwards-looping tail that occurs frequently in the VMS. The tail varies but the stem is drawn in a reasonably consistent way. It leans back at approximately the same angle and is somewhat blunt on the ends, with minimal or no uptick at the bottom of the stroke to join it to the next letter as is found on the glyph that resembles an “a”. You can tell from the thick and thin strokes that the VM author holds the quill to a slightly left-leaning angle.

Now, take a look at the last two lines of text on Folio 10r. Unusual characters have been added that do not match the shape of normal VM glyphs.

Jan van Bijlert Saint Luke the Evangelist Detail, Christie’s Amsterdam 13 April 2010

Note: Some of these details may not be apparent to the viewer if you have never learned calligraphy (or spent a number of hours carefully studying the shapes of the VMS characters). Subtleties such as the angle of the pen are hard to discern unless you have training and you might want to consult the original high-resolution scans so you can look at these details more closely than they are illustrated here.

The Added Characters

On the last four lines of Folio 10r are several anomalous characters. I’ve highlighted the main text r-with-tail in blue and the anomalous characters in red (I hesitated about including the “o” on the second-last line as it’s probably a regular VM character).

These characters differ from the surrounding text in a number of ways. It’s also possible that the figure-8 glyph on the bottom line has been added (or overwritten) by another hand but it’s hard to tell and it is contextually consistent with the main text, so I’m assuming it’s part of the regular text.

Note that in the unusual characters, the pen is held at a slightly different angle. On the high-res scans, you can particularly see this in the bottom “o” character which leans a tiny bit more to the left and correctly applies the thick and thin characteristics of a calligraphic “o” that is not usually seen in regular VM “o” shapes. Notice also that the average size of the added “o” glyphs (particularly the bottom one) is slightly larger than the average size of the “o” in the main text.

It’s not just the shape and size of the 1st and 3rd “o” that are different, note that the added characters are tightly spaced (four of them touch adjacent characters), which is unusual for VMS script. Also note that the positions of the first and second “o” are inconsistent with the usual VM text formula for glyph placement. The “4” character is rarely preceded by other characters, it’s usually preceded by a space, and it’s very unusual for it to be preceded by an “o”. It is typically followed by an “o”.

The leaning “r” glyph differs even more from the main text than the “o”—it’s barely recognizable as a VMS character. It doesn’t have the typically straight stem, it’s not as blunt at the beginning or end of the stroke, and the stem curves backwards in a very nonVMS way.

It doesn’t connect the tail in the same way, either. The VMS “r” is created in two strokes like the c/e with a tail—first the stem, then the tail, with the tail attached slightly below the top of the stem. The anomalous “r” appears to be drawn in a continuous stroke, from bottom to top left and adding the tail without lifting the pen, so that the tail attaches to the top of the stem rather than partway down. Even if it were drawn in two strokes, the attachment is at the very top and there is almost a hook on the top-left that doesn’t occur in the regular VMS “r”.

Why Add Extra Characters?

It’s odd that only a few characters would be added in a very specific place on this page.

Was it to obscure the underlying meaning or to correct it? Was it to clean up the margin?

It doesn’t appear to be a correction to the sound or meaning of the text, because the first “o” appears to be incorrectly placed by someone who hasn’t noticed the glyph-combination patterns that dominate the rest of the manuscript. Either the scribe knew something we didn’t know or understood it even less than contemporary researchers.

It also doesn’t seem likely that text was added to clean up the left margin because the margin on this page was fairly wavy anyway, adding a few characters at the bottom (especially if the second “o” was part of the original text) doesn’t significantly alter the overall impression of the page.

You’re probably wondering if this alien hand appears elsewhere in the document. I think it does, although the example on the left from Folio 14v is only one character, so it’s hard to assess. It’s definitely not a standard VMS character.

Look at the left curve of the glyph marked in red. It’s the same curve as the fractured “r” on the previous folio and the VMS rarely has tails swooping from the bottom of a letter (they occur, but not often).

Summary

Why would someone add letters that don’t contribute to formatting or the formulaic consistency of the text, with ink and a quill that are similar enough to the surrounding text that the anomaly doesn’t jump out at you right away?

Were they practicing? Did they pick an inconspicuous spot on an inner page to see if they could match the text, with the possible intention of adding more elsewhere in the document? If so, I would call it a failed experiment unless the scribe later figured out how to mimic the VMS characters more closely.

Was someone just playing around? Could it have been a younger person who wanted to be part of the big project and didn’t understand that there was a pattern to the text? Could it be the same person who painted some of the drawings in a more sloppy manner than others?

I don’t have an explanation for the extra characters but I think it’s important to note that the ink very closely matches the rest of the text, even if the letter shapes do not. It makes you wonder if it was done with the same quill and ink pot, even if by a different person.

J.K. Petersen

When Herbal Traditions Gang Awry 16 Jan 2016

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The Mutation of Information

Our Grade 3 teacher wrote something on a piece of paper one day and handed it to the first student at the front of the class and told the student not to show the note to anyone, but to whisper the message to the next student. That student was then directed to whisper it to the next and so on, from mouth to ear, around the room.

Detail of The Whisperer by Gustave Leonhard

We waited in anxious anticipation to find out the secret message. At the end of the chain, the final student repeated the words out loud and we laughed because it didn’t make much sense. When the original note was read out loud, quite a few of us were surprised at how the message had changed.

That was my introduction to how information can mutate, when passed from one person to the next, and I soon realized that drawings and text could undergo signification transformations as well. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, the original intent gets blurred and sometimes, as future copyists try to guess what is missing and reinsert it, it takes on a new life in a different form.

Herbal Traditions

Medical papyrus from c. 1600 BCE held in the New York Academy of Medicine

Medical writings date back more than 4500 years, to a time when only the elite had the knowledge and materials to record them. Due to high levels of illiteracy, much of what medieval westerners knew about herbs had been passed down unchanged from the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Arabs. The words of Pliny, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen were still considered expert knowledge, with little critical analysis, centuries after they had passed away.

The earliest herbal descriptions do not include drawings, other than the occasional sheaf of grain, or an unidentifiable three-leaved plant meant to be symbolic rather than literal. Even when the plant was carefully described in words, those words were often very brief, and later students who studied the written descriptions sometimes misidentified the plants due to their limited understanding of botany or because they lived in regions where plants that looked similar could be entirely different species.

We’re not sure when the tradition of creating illustrated herbals began but the Egyptian fragment on the right is from a c. 400 BCE herbal papyrus called the Johnson Papyrus. In the 1st century BCE, a physician known as Crateuas/Kratevus may have been a pioneer and it’s thought that his work influenced later illustrated copies of Dioscorides’ work. His name is mentioned in several Latin and French editions on the general history of plants from the 16th and 17th centuries but only a few fragments of his work survive.

The Development of Herbal Traditions

When efforts to illustrate plants became more common, those who drew them were often doctors and apothecaries rather than artists, limited in their drawing skills. To make matters worse, sometimes only the parts with medicinal properties were illustrated, leaving out features that might not be relevant to medicine, but which would have helped identify the plants. On top of this, copyists sometimes misinterpreted the older drawings and changed their features unintentionally.

Saffron

If we take the example of saffron, which is revered for its golden-orange threads that are used as a dyestuff to color foods such as rice, we can see how herbal tradition can misinform.

The plant that the ancients identified as saffron is a form of crocus, a relative of the iris. The crocus plant, a bulbous harbinger of spring, is found worldwide and comprises almost 100 species. Saffron comes from a specific crocus (Crocus sativus), which may have been deliberately bred thousands of years ago, for its desirable threads.

The saffron crocus propagates through divisions of the bulb, and here is where herbal tradition goes awry. At some point, an attempt to document this propagation resulted in a drawing of a bulb that resembles a lily or garlic bulb more than a crocus. It doesn’t accurately illustrate the way crocus bulbs divide, and thus could lead to misidentification of the plant. The leaves are sometimes also represented incorrectly. Various crocus species can be recognized by the shape, width, and length of their leaves in combination with other features. In fact, some species have no leaves at all. If the plant is drawn inaccurately, the wrong species may be harvested. C. sativus has slender leaves yet some of the herbal manuscripts show it with no leaves.

If you consider that the autumn crocus, a toxic plant that looks very similar to spring crocus, is a different species that grows in many of the same areas, you can see why details are important. Except for the protruding threads, the botanical drawing on upper-left resembles certain varieties of autumn crocus (Colchicum speciosum) more than it does Crocus sativus. Worse yet, Colchicum is sometimes called “autumn saffron” or “meadow saffron”, even though it is not the plant that supplies saffron.

Peculiarities and Provenance

From a historian’s point of view, a mistake by the original scribe or illustrator isn’t always a bad thing. Imperfections and peculiarities in plant drawings can sometimes help us chart the provenance of a manuscript. If the drawings are accurate, it’s difficult to know whether they are based on live plants or on previous drawings. When they are inaccurate, especially if several plants in a compendium are inaccurate in the same specific ways, sometimes the quirks can reveal the illustrator’s sources.

Other aspects of the plant, such as the way it is rendered, or the addition of snakes or faces, or its relationship to other elements of the page, can also provide clues as to where the illustrator got his ideas. For example, in the Voynich Manuscript, roots shaped as animals and roots with human faces suggest a familiarity with other herbal manuscripts of the time.

Oddities That May Not Be So Odd

Sometimes eccentricities in herbal drawings are based on superstition, and sometimes they have other explanations. It’s not uncommon for herbal drawings to express similarities to animals. In fact, in the middle ages some people believed that if a plant was shaped like a body part, it was God’s signal that the plant should be used to cure that part of the anatomy. Or, if it resembled an animal, it was meant to attract or deflect that animal or to cure a specific kind of animal bite.

The legend of the mandrake plant, which has a root that resembles the human form, is that it screams when it is uprooted and will harm those who hear the scream. The solution is to tie a dog to the plant, get out of hearing range, and then have the dog pull out the plant by its roots.

It’s tempting to interpret VMS Plant 25v as a mandrake, with its whorl of basal leaves, but the root isn’t thick enough and the critter nibbling on the leaf looks more like a dragon than a dog. Also, the mandrake doesn’t have parallel veins, and the VM illustrator has clearly illustrated this leaf structure, so it’s not likely that this is intended to be Mandragora—it may be something else related to dragons (or possibly to sheep, since this may be a badly drawn turtle-shell lamb).

Another VMS plant has leaves that look like bird heads. The shape may be symbolic, intentional exaggeration, or perhaps there’s a simpler explanation. There are some plants that curve dramatically in one direction or the other as they dry. Sometimes leaves that hang down may turn upward or the tips of the leaves may rotate in one direction until they resemble the heads of birds. There is an African plant with symmetric leaves that look like birds’ heads when they dry.

Some of the peculiarities in the VMS may be due to tradition or superstition, they certainly appear fantastical in many ways… others may be artistic expressions of natural processes that aren’t so peculiar as they seem at first glance.

J.K. Petersen

Voynich Location – What Can Libra Tell Us?

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14 Jan 2016

The Constellation Libra

The constellation Libra hit the news at almost the same time I discovered the Voynich Manuscript. A comet was visible, in February 2009, at the topmost point of the stars we associate and identify as Libra. It delighted stargazers by being as bright as stars in the Big Dipper, visible to the unaided eye.

My previous post discussed the unusual depiction of Scorpio in the VMS, and since Libra is adjacent to Scorpius, from our earthly point of view, this is probably a good time to post some of my findings about the VM illustrator’s drawing of Libra.

If you turn your head to the right when looking at this chart of Libra and Scorpio from NASA Science, you can see that Libra looks like a set of scales. Scales in the middle ages were different from what we have now. Modern scales are based on springs and pressure sensors. Medieval scales were based on comparisons of similarly weighted items.

If you fasten cups to both ends of a pole and place a known weight in one of the cups, you can find out if another object, like a piece of silver, weighs more or less than the known object by how much the pole slopes off the horizontal.

To aid in determining whether the pole is horizontal, people in antiquity added a spike in the center of the pole that would poke out in one direction or the other to indicate whether the objects in the cups (or the cups themselves, if they were empty) were off-balance.

Scales and the Concept of Justice

The idea of a balancing scale has long been associated with concepts of fairness and equality and sometimes ventures into the allegorical, as in this Egyptian depiction, from the Book of the Dead (a collective term rather than a literal form of book), of a scribe’s heart being measured against the feather of truth. The goddess Maat, Egypt’s spiritual representative of truth and justice, is identifiable at the apex of the scale, wearing the feather of truth.

Sometimes additional stars are considered when envisioning Libra. In fact, in antiquity, the “feet” of Libra were sometimes seen as part of the claws of Scorpio. The inclusion of additional stars explains why some illustrators show Libra held aloft by a Virgo-like figure.

This interesting variation, scales by themselves, or scales held by human figures, is what brings us back to the drawing of Libra in the Voynich Manuscript. Can the VM illustrator’s choice tell us anything about the temporal or geographical origin of the manuscript?

By Itself or Held Aloft

Images of Libra as a zodiac symbol can be loosely classified into two kinds: those that include only the scales (or sometimes a hand holding the scales), and those that have most or all of a human form holding the scales.

I assembled two charts to compare their geographical distribution. I confined the search to images of Libra that accompanied other zodiac symbols in the same document and which were created prior to about 1560. I found more images of Libra as scales than could fit on a chart and selected ones that were generally representative. It was more difficult to find examples of Libra held by human forms and they fit fairly well on one page.

Some of the scales are drawn level and straight on, so you can’t see the balance spike that shows when the scale is off balance. Others show the spike even though the pole is more-or-less horizontal. It’s noteworthy that the Voynich illustrator went to some pains to make the spike visible, even broadening the distance within the housing and painting it blue so it can be clearly seen.

Now let’s take a look at Libra in human form…

Examples of Libra as a person holding scales are harder to find. This may be due to interpretation of the stars and how many constitute Libra or there may be a simpler explanation—humans are harder to draw. It might also be a combination of the two.

There aren’t enough samples to drawn any conclusions and most of the Libra-as-human examples appear to be from the same general geographical areas so we’re not looking at divergent data sets. The paucity of examples from southern France and Spain probably has to more to do with lack of access to digitally scanned files than it does to the number of examples that are extant.

With research, you never know where it will lead or which little details might become important later so sometimes you just have to gather it, present it, and offer it as information, without trying to extract too much meaning.

Thoughts about Scale and the Voynich Scales

As far as the Voynich manuscript goes, I’ll leave you with one little thought…

Did you notice that the cups of the Voynich scale are small and deep (almost round), rather than wide and a bit flatter like most of the others?

The shape of the cups might be small so it’s easier to draw them within the circle, or perhaps they are small for the same reason they are small in the Arabic document shown in the lower right of the above chart.

Or, there may be a practical reason for drawing them this way. Scales for weighing food, or perhaps coins, need to be somewhat broad so it’s easier to move the items on and off the scale. Scales for herbs and powders need to be deeper and narrower so they are not blown away by a draft, or by a breath of wind, if the scale is used outside in a marketplace.

We can’t really know if the small deep cups are intentional, subconscious (if that is what the illustrator was used to seeing), or simply a space or time consideration, but given that the spike and the connection to the main pole are carefully included, perhaps the shape of the cups was intended as well.

J.K. Petersen