Astrological symbols... decoded!

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone had any further contact with Luke Andrews?

His January 2001 comment (on f57v) is *absolutely* spot on. Decoding the 
(2nd ring in) sequence of 17 x 4 is so obvious it's *shocking*. The 
sequence runs:-

sun		but without the dot
mercury	but without the cross)
venus		stylised into an 8
mars		stylised into a 2-like loop
moon		stylised into an arch
jupiter		oddly stylised
saturn		stylised into a gallows
capricorn	exactly as in the zodiac
aquarius	stylised into a single stroke
pisces		stylised into a shape and a tick
aries		stylised into the symmetrical gallows
taurus		stylised into a single stroke
gemini		stylised into a stroke and a dot (usually)
cancer	weird gallows - I don't quite get it
leo		stylised into a simple stroke
virgo		odd one - simple boxy stroke
libra		single scale on the side

The planet sequence is then repeated, but in the second instance the first 
two zodiac signs are replaced with:-

scorpio	stylised scorpionic sign
sagittarius	three loop - looks as though he was running out of ideas?

I don't know what's so special about 17 that makes it the right number for 
fitting 19 symbols into - but probably others more will enlighten me. :-)

What do I infer from this? Simple - that the underlying alphabet of the VMS 
is based on astrological symbols, stylised into single (or short) 
pen-strokes for ease of writing.

But this wouldn't have happened overnight: I predict that the VMS' alphabet 
was a mature writing system that evolved out of an earlier astrological 
writing system. Are there known examples of this kind of thing?

I also predict that the earlier system was simply encrypted - using the 
four gallows characters as simple state-change markers - but was found to 
be too easily crackable, and so required further refinements (like the 
struck-through gallows, and other tricks). So the system we are looking at 
is further encrypted - hence the difficulty we have in getting to grips 
with it.

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