earlier post<\/a>). Could the pangolin-like creature also be a fleece? Could the curled-up creature be a pointy nosed lamb? Maybe those lines are nebuly lines after all and they indicate a dearly departed creature rather than a live one. The problem is it doesn’t look like the other sheep-like creatures in the VMS, it has a very sharp snout and the others are blunt, and the illustrator has made the back very scale-like\u2014quite different from most sheeply creatures.<\/p>\nCould it be a beaver about to become a beaveress or some other animal making a lifestyle change? Looking at the drawing by itself, it seems possible that it is eyeballing its undersides but… context should never be overlooked, and beneath the critter is a woman with a ring, and the animal seems to be suspended above her as though on a cloud or canopy. That seems an odd place for him to aim his teeth at his chestnuts.<\/p>\n
Well what about the fleece idea? Golden fleece pendants were worn by members of the order of the Golden Fleece in the 15th century, but could a door above a meeting place have a suspended fleece as a sign? They have them now, but that doesn’t mean such a thing existed in the early 1400s. As usual, the way it’s presented in the VMS makes it hard to pin down.<\/p>\n
J.K. Petersen<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a9 Copyright 2016 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\nPostscript 9 Nov. 2019: I’ve been meaning to add this for months… it occurs to me from time-to-time that maybe the VMS illustrator used a minimum of visual exemplars (it wasn’t easy to get access to books in the Middle Ages) and perhaps was drawing from written (or verbal) sources.<\/p>\n
Not all manuscripts were illustrated. In fact, many of them weren’t. For example, there are numerous medieval descriptions of plants and plant-based remedies that don’t have illustrations.<\/p>\n
So, if the VMS illustrator heard (or read) the following passage in Revelation, how might they interpret an image of a fleece, sacrificial lamb, or lamb of God?<\/p>\n
\nWorthy art thou to take the scroll, and to open the seals of it, because thou wast slain, and didst redeem us to God in thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and didst make us to our God kings and priests, and we shall reign upon the earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The reason I looked up this passage is because early depictions of Agus Dei (often called “the lamb of God”) generally show the lamb standing, while depictions from the latter 15th century and onward often show the lamb lying down or even sagging down. Is this due to a subtle difference in how passages such as “thou wast slain” were interpreted or iconographically represented?<\/p>\n
Another thing I noticed while reading through the Bible was that the word “kid” is generally not used to distinguish a baby goat from a baby sheep. In fact, one passage in particular suggests the word “lamb” could refer to either a sheep or a goat:<\/p>\n
\n…a lamb, a perfect one, a male, a son of a year, let be to you; from the sheep or from the goats ye do take. — Exodus 12<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
If the critter in the VMS were interpreted as Agnus Dei, then perhaps the idea that either a baby sheep or goat could be sacrificed might result in a drawing with appendages that could be ears… or perhaps could be horns.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
26 April 2016 Have you ever come across a single piece of information that gives everything a different perspective? In 2008 and 2009, I obsessively perused every herbal manuscript I could find, going back to them again and again (you know you’ve been looking at too many herbals when you recognize crudely drawn plants without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,86],"tags":[124,123,57,271,270,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3038"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9191,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions\/9191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}