VMs: Various observations/questions

["surfing t" <surf17@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I'm quite new to this fascinating mystery and would like to help out. I have the following questions:

1) What do people make out of the illustration on page with ID 1006108 (on the Beinecke-library)? To me, it looks like some people taking off in a gigantic helicopter. Forgive me for my ignorance, but had the idea of the use of wings etc. for flying been published at the time the Voynich document is thought to have been published. The wings seems to appear again on picture 1006214.

2) I'm positve I'm not the first to notice that some of the labels on the illustrations repeats: For example, the string "202ap" (I have chosen the closest symbols I know) is seen on the right of picture 1006212 and again to the left of 1006209. Other strings repeats as well in the illustrations. Has anyone speculated on this and found any patterns in the repetitions (for example, do the repetitions solely occur on pictures with many women? - are they the names of the women)?

3) Several people note that some words are repeated several times. I have a theory that these words must be numbers in writing. For example, the number "3" could be written as "one one one". Of course, such a unary numbering scheme is not practical for larger numbers, but there could be another word for fx 10 so that 14 could be written as "ten one one one one" etc. This leads me to the following question: Do these cases of multiple repetition occur more often in some parts of the documents than the others? And what about the words that do repeat? What is their frequency in the various sections? Has anyone researched this? The sections is the book are clearly about distinct "subjects" so one could reasonably expect differing frequencies of use of numbers - and the reptitions might be indicators numbers.

4) What do people make of the illustrations of the pictures with women? Most of the pictures apparently show women showering but I wonder why they put there hand up into the tube on most of the pictures. It almost seems as if they are about to be "sucked" into the pipe system. On other pictures, the women are sitting in containers connected to the elaborate piping system. Additionally, on at least one illustrations some drops of water from the pipe system appear to drip down onto the face of a woman lying down. This woman is lying immediately below a container in which a woman appears to be sucked down. One interpretation could be that the "spirit" of that women is being sucked out and is transfered to the woman lying down. Do you agree with this? What are the popular theories on these pictures?

Frankly, most of the illustrations in the "biological" section doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look as illustrations from the average religious document.

One thing that strikes me is a similarity between the text and the pictures: Both seems to make sense at the immediate level: We can recognize that the text is a text, it contains 
known concepts of text. However looked at as a whole it doesn't make much sense. The same with the pictures: They contain elements we recognize, but some of the objects we don't and we certainly don't understand the combination of objects and the interactions of the objects. It's like the illustrations have been made to look like they are meaningful but in fact they are not. I think if the illustrator wanted them to actually *illustrate* a concept (such as showering etc.) they would have looked differently.  There are three possibilities:

a) The pictures have absolutely no meaning. The entire thing is a hoax and the illustrator drew something random, what came to his mind on the first page or two and elaborated on the "ideas" of these pages on the following pages so as to make it look like there was a system and a meaning.

b) The pictures is the encoding of a message. Maybe the obvious details on the pictures are not interesting, but the interesting stuff lies in the details. The rich labelling of the pictures could indicate that the pictures play a role in the decipherment of the text of the document.

c) The pictures really are illustrations of something. As noted above I don't think their point is to explain a concept. I think it looks more like reflects over a story. Maybe the text tells some kind of story that the pictures illustrate. The fact that some of the motifs (the showering women) are repeated over and over (note that repetition is another feature that the pictures have in commen with the text) is an argument against this possibility while the "helicopter" pictures would fit this explanation.

I'm leaning on b) being the most likely explanation. What do you think?

Thanks for listening! :)


____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list