f56r - an inverse hyperbolic spiral?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Following on from my recent letter to New Scientist, I've been emailed by a 
number of different people asking for more information, with some offering 
their own observations etc.

The most interesting observation came from Stan Tenen, who some of you may 
know from the Meru Foundation (http://www.meru.org).

If I understand it correctly, Meru is essentially based around two 
particular ideas:-
(1) that the Hebrew alphabet was preceded by a universal gesture language 
(which some people equate with the language of Babel), and that the forms 
of Hebrew letters are in some way a codfication of that gesture language; and
(2) that the letters of the alphabet can also be thought of as being 
multiple views of a single non-linear curve - the "light in the meeting 
tent" hypothesis.

Over the last 15 years, he has been trying to systematically make these two 
hypotheses concrete: and believes that the non-linear curve involved is the 
inverse hyperbolic spiral... a particularly clear example of which is on 
Voynich f56r (which Dana provisionally identified as "Palm, Chamaedorea 
elegans"?). Stan's comments on this illustration:-

	The shape of the stalk is that of the inverse or hyperbolic spiral.
	This particular spiral, which is not a log or a golden type spiral,
	appears throughout Leonardo's notebooks, throughout the
	illustrations in the Book of Kells, and most prominently, under
	the "Eye of Horus".

	The two florets at the bottom have a total of 33 spikes. There are
	33 tetrahedra in a unit-turn tetrahelical column, and there are 33
	vertebrae (including fused) in the human spine.

	The total number of flame-like "leaves" is 18, but there are also 2
	more complicated florets, plus the 2 at the bottom, for a total of
	22, which is the number of Canaanite letters. There are also 22
	faces exposed on each of the 3 ribbons of a 33-tetrahedron
	tetrahelical column.

	The base has a pineapple-pine tree type structure, with 9 or 10
	spikes. Either number could also allude to the
	Hebrew-Greek-Arabic alphabet system.

	The 18 flame-like leaves reverse-taper, with the larger leaves
	near the center of the spiral, and the smaller leaves closer to the
	vertical, linear part of the "stem". This is a characteristic of the
	reciprocal spiral, where angles get larger, the closer to the center.
	The equation for the reciprocal or hyperbolic spiral is r x theta = 1.

	The reciprocal or hyperbolic spiral is almost completely
	un-noticed by scholars, who consider all spirals to be the same.
	But in fact, it's very particular, and totally different than any other
	spiral, because it moves smoothly from circular motion,
	strangling the origin, to become asymptotic to a straight line (in
	this case, vertical).

	It's the number of parts, the flame-shaped leaves, and the shape
	of the bigger leaf-blossoms, that matches the features of the
	model I've been researching. So, the exact geometry is not as
	important, particularly since it's my guess that the geometry
	was known in slightly different contexts at different times, and
	in different cultures.

	But there's no other structure besides the unit-turn tetrahelical
	column that has 33 volumes and 3 ribbons of 22 faces. Also,
	the 18 flame-shaped leaves could be a reference to Islamic
	sources, where although the alphabet contains the full 27
	letters, the basic shapes number 18 (if I remember correctly
	 -- someone should check this).

	So, I'd assume that the drawing on Voynich page 56 was
	passed down through a Moslem source, at least at some point.

He also strongly asserts that the construction of this spiral is based 
around a mathematical approximation to squaring the circle (based on 
inverse numbers), which may have been known to the Egyptians - there's a 
proper discussion of this on the meru.org website.

The obvious question to ask here is: have any of you seen this same inverse 
hyperbolic spiral in any other documents of the time (or earlier)? I'm 
thinking specifically of the Arabic Dioscorides etc?

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