Labels: thoughts on ot- and ok- prefixes...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd share my cataloguing data (and conclusions) from the 12 
astrological pages.

I analysed all the words from there beginning with <EVA ok-> and <EVA ot->, 
to see if they shared any common features that might indicate some kind of 
common indexing mechanism.

One thing that arose from this was: if you think of <EVA o e l> as 
~planets~, then when you see two side-by-side within the VMS, 
astrologically that would be a *conjunction*: each planet-pair were (and 
still are) thought to have different meanings. What's important here is 
that this forms another indexing mechanism.

	EVA	planetary interpretation
	---	---------------------------------
	al	moon conjunction mercury
	ol	sun conjunction mercury
	ao	moon conjunction sun   (I believe this is written "eo" in the VMS)

My justication for "ao" being written "eo" is simple: the unobfuscated moon 
symbol would be a simple arch: put that on its side, and you get EVA e: eo 
then would be (astro)logical shorthand for (moon+sun).

IIRC, Agrippa (and probably many others) used special glypyhs for 
particular planetary conjunctions, so this step shouldn't take a vast leap 
of imagination.

The most common following tokens (ignoring y, which looks to be independent 
of this) then turn out to be (assuming that "cc" = Pisces, sh/ch = Libra, 
and "a[i]r/ai[i]n" = Scorpio/Virgo):-

After:	ok-:	ot-:
--------------------------
1	eo[ao]	eo[ao]
2	al	cc
3	e	e
4	cc	al
5	ar/air	ar/air
6	o	ch/sh
7	ol	ain/aiin
8	ain/aiin	ol
9	ch/sh	a
0	l	(none counted)

These correspond fairly well to each other, with only minor differences of 
order: but each have basically ten following symbols, here tabulated in 
descending order of frequency.

Could this be something like the VMS' *number* system, in roughly ascending 
numerical order? Are there any parts of the VMS where these symbols appear 
in sequential order, that we might be able to use as a number crib? The 
absence of numbers in the VMS has always been one of its mysteries...

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: could it be that there is no missing astrological folio? We already 
have 12 diagrams (with two light/dark pairs) - but this may turn out to be 
mere deception by the VMS author. The person performing the foliation may 
have wrongly deduced that there was a sheet missing because of this... just 
a thought. :-)