[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: VMS -- Botany (f05v) Hidden Images

Hi Dana,

When I heard her say leaves, butterfly, bat, bird,
and eagle I felt satisfied that I was on the right track for this is
also what I see, birds aflight aimed in different directions just like
we find in the symbolic drawings of Alchemy. Now I realize that my
imagination might have gotten carried away a bit, but I wouldn't be
surprised in the least if the scribe of the VMS was having fun and had
these same ideas in mind when drawing this plant. There may be more,
additional flowers (crowns?), three stems leading into the roots (3
legs?), and what might the stylized drawing of the roots represent?

Interesting! (Two Sephirotic references in 2 days!) :-)

One (related) aspect of the VMS continues to puzzle me: that the handwriting is (generally) so precise, yet the diagrams are so wayward or misreferential. Compared to most other herbals it's all so crude... yet the suspicion remains that there's a level of reference that we're missing.

Certainly, I don't see any out-and-out classic herbal visual puns (like mandrake root etc) in the VMS: and I don't see any metaphorical dimension to any of the images.

To me, the nymphs look as though they're expressing some form of hidden language (though I don't know what it is... yet): so, could (as you suggest) the herbals be doing much the same?

The VMS looks like an exercise in concealment, rather than in metaphor: so my instinct would have been to look for information hidden in plain view in the numerical/structural/relational dimensions of the plants - ie, number/structure/connectedness of leaves/petals/stems/roots. Oh, and also the colour (f05v contains "red, green, b" according to the interlinear file - but what is where?)

Looking at the diagrams with a purely alchemical eye is certainly an avenue that would be interesting to travel down... but I have to say that I'm not brimming with confidence, purely because the quality of the images we're using to make our judgements and predictions on is so terribly, terribly poor, especially in monochrome. In http://www.fsbobiz.com/voynich/jpeg/f05v.jpg we quite literally are projecting onto inkblots. :-((((

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