VMs: Astrological alphabets (etc)...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Pamela,

Welcome to the list, I'm sure you'll feel quite at home here. :-)

You mentioned astrological alphabets: I set in motion a thread on this 
theme in 2001, with my "Astrological Alphabet Hypothesis" (AAH) - the basic 
idea was that (as with numbers), as we can't see astrology anywhere in the 
VMs, perhaps it's everywhere, embedded in the alphabet itself. IIRC, I 
found the "17 x 4" ring on f57v suggestive of being a sequence of signs and 
planets, but I'd need to review that evidence again, it's a long time ago...
	http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.voynich.net+AAH

BTW, I'm currently looking for the document I wrote summarising the AAH at 
the time, & will post a link to the list when I find it (time to power up 
my old PC, etc).

FWIW, I now see medieval-to-early-modern astrology not in terms of court 
astrology (ie directing affairs of state, like Frederick II & Nancy 
Reagan), but rather as a diffusely-located middle-class activity, for those 
seeking empowerment & self-advancement - where the (slightly more) modern 
middle-class zeal for information is just a rationalised version of the same.

Therefore, the Church's pressure on astrologers to move away from fatalism 
& determinism (which ultimately produced Ficino and modern psychological 
astrology, so moving from 'prediction' to 'predilection') effectively 
disempowered the middle classes, removing their aspirations to power by 
undermining their perceived means to achieve it. And the same goes for 
magic (both demonic and natural) - for example, the middle section of 
William Eamon's (1994) "Science and the Secrets of Nature" (which I've 
mentioned before on-list) has a fair bit on how the Church explicitly saw 
the expansion of natural magic and the related "naturalism" as threatening 
its control of its middle-class power-base, which I think is all part of 
the same overall story.

I don't know of any good books that cover this kind of "social history of 
astrology" (any recommendations, anyone?), but this view does impact on 
where you place the VMs in the web of history. For example, I can't 
comfortably place the VMs' 360-degree zodiac pages as a tool for 
psychological astrology at all - it's far more likely to be a late-medieval 
predictive system, derived from the same (probably Arabic transmitted) 
school from which Pietro d'Abano's works sprang.

Overall, I think that makes the VMs hard to reconcile with post-1600 
astrology (and most post-1500 astrology, too) where that kind of medieval 
thinking has been stripped right out. The question for the VMs' zodiac 
section is this: if it's expressing some kind of astrological secret, what 
is that secret? Steve Ekwall's belief that it's predicting male births 
(based on the time of conception) seems as good as (if not better) any 
other... interesting!

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

PS: nice Lilly site: http://www.skyhook.co.uk/merlin/


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