Re: Found: One tables-like character

[Adam McLean <alchemy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> Some of the illustrations in her book are misleading to those
>> who have not studied the subject in depth. 
>
>However, the thing I saw wasn't in any list of standard symbols
>I have ever seen and it was a photograph of a page, not am
>illustration.  


Dear Brian,

I think that you will find that all the black and white illustrations
in Diana Fernando's book are actually her own drawings based
on and reworking original illustrations.

If you want to see a reproduction of a list of alchemical symbols 
please go to my web site

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/alchemical_symbols00.html

Alchemical symbols in sixteen pages containing hundreds of symbols. 
>From Medicinisch-Chymisch- und Alchemistisches Oraculum, 1755.

or

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/val_symb.html


>If it had been a drawing I would have dismissed it.  If
>you put the three symbols side by side, it looks like a natural
>evolution, with Voynich being far closer to this character in
>the photograph than the character is to the 'standard' alchemy
>symbol for arsenic.  Hmm, as I said, I don't put much faith in
>the book as a scholarly piece of work, but does that mean the
>photograph is faked?  If you showed me the same photograph with
>the caption, "Taken from the Olaus Wormus edition of The
>Necronomicon" I'd still want to know where the photograph came
>from.

To repeat, this is not a photograph but a drawing of Diana Fernando.
It is a reworking of an illustration from  an alchemical manuscript
now in the University of Leiden, Cod. Vossiana Chemica. Q51
which was in Stanislas Klossowski de Rola's Alchemy: The Secret
Art, London 1973 (pages 126-128).  You can even see that because 
she could not read the German words in the list she just created a 
scribble !!!!  

The point is, this has nothing to do with Trithemius and the
Steganographia except in the imagination of the editor of Diana
Fernando's book.

Best wishes,

Adam McLean



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