Re: astrological iconography

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Robert Firth wrote:
 
> The "celestial" parts of the VMS have always
> seemed to me the most likely door to open,
> mainly because we already have most of
> the required "Rosetta stone" - the stars
> themselves, of course.  The calendar was
> one of the first things to be deciphered in
> most ancient scripts.
> 
> And the zodiac pages should be the best place
> to start.  So why doesn't that work??

It's too difficult with what we have, is my guess.
And we have quite a number of good (even if not 
dead certain) ones:
- the Pleiades and Aldebaran
- the seven planets
- two sets of twelve labels in 12-segmented circles
- one (or two?) set of 28 segments, "obviously"
  indicating the mansions of the moon

Now the zodiac labels might swing the balance. We've
299 of them (one missing in Gemini). These 299 words
have a much flatter 'Zipf' distribution than the normal
Voynich words. I once thought they could be numbers
indicating ecliptic latitude. In order to get the 
distribution we see, they should have a resolution of
one arc minute (assumung a cosine distribution from -30
to +90 deg), which is not realistic before Tycho.
It would also not be sensible since the longitude reso-
lution is only one degree.

> (c) the obvious explanation - though of course
> not necessarily the right one - is that the names
> were written in by somebody at Rudolf's court
> in Prague.

Or after. Or before. If before, it might help us further
in tracing the VMs back in time.
And the 'dialect' is still odd.

What is even odder is of course the fact that they're
there at all. The Sun is in the sign of Aries (roughly) 
from 21 March to 21 April. Of course, in the middle
of the 15th C, they were 10 days out, so it was
(roughly) from 11 March to 11 April.
That is, most of March (associated in the VMs with
Pisces) is covered by Aries. This explains neither the 
fact that the zodiac starts with Pisces nor that 
a zodiac sign is associated with a month.

Are the month names in a similar hand as the 
'michiton oladabas' lines?
That reminds me: can anyone tell me what happened to
the first 'i' in 'michiton'? :-)

> PS: While I know a fair bit about astrology, I most
> assuredly do not know what astrology was like in
> the 14 or 15 century or how much it differed from
> today's.  We need here not an astrologer, but an
> expert in the history of European astrology, if
> we can find one.

We're quite fortunate that Bradley Schaefer found one,
that Rafal Prinke managed to contact her and that she
has indeed taken a close look at the VMs.

Cheers, Rene

PS: