Found: One tables-like character

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

	I found a very Voynich like character in a semi pop occult book
in Border's Bookstore, the reference is at the bottom.  It was
in an entry for Johannes Trithemius.  I'm sure Rafal is familiar
with him, and a lot of things in there suggested to me that he
(or one of his students) might be a good candidate for the
writer (though he died in 1516). More on that later, I am very
busy right now. 
	The character:  The text mentions that Trithemius used
steganographic characters, in the margin they had a small
picture marked "steganographic characters such as those used by
Trithemius"  they had no reference as to whether the writer was
Trithemius or someone else or where the picture came from. 
Anyway, what struck me was a lower case English 'o' with a line
going from it almost connecting to a lower case English 'c', the
bridge was fairly long so that they could fit above it a large
'v' like character with both of the lines fairly wavy (like a
flame) and the left being significantly shorter than the right. 
It looked very similar to EVA Sh (sorry, I can't find my Currier
reference page).  I looked everywhere for a similar character on
the web, what I found was the alchemical symbol for arsenic,
which is like two lower case 'o's connected.  The V above might
indicate it's in solution as there was also a 'v' like character
(on the same web page) with little circles at the three points
meaning 'elixa vitae'.  Maybe they combined symbols like this? 
You could expect a lot of variance.  I wouldn't make a big deal
about that Arsenic sygil being the same thing as I saw in the
book except that in the picture, the word next to the
Voynich-like/Arsenic-like character was 'Arsenicum'.  Has this
been found before?  Im sure Trithemius' book on encoding and
decoding magical writings has been brought up before, but if
anyone wants to look at it, there is an on-line version of
'Steganographia' at: http://www.avesta.org/esoteric.htm 
Unfortunately, translating 'Arsenicum' to 'Arsenic' is about the
extent of my Latin.  Regards,

Brian

Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z 
Diana Fernando 
Hardcover - 192 pages (August 1998) 
Blandford; ISBN: 0713726687