Re: VMs: MS408 Character Development

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 04:28 24/06/2005 -0500, Tom Procter wrote:
> First they have three groups of characters:
> - latin letters
> - numbers
> - pictograms (most characters)
>
> You have to keep in mind they think the VMS is a teaching book of 
> spiritual content. Deciphering was a solution for the author of VMS in two 
> ways: protection against inquisition and the best method to show what you 
> cannot describe.
>
> Latin letters (only 2): a + o
> They took it from the bible, Revelation of St. John the Devine, chapter 1 # 8.
>
> the numbers:
> on one hand they are also pictograms, on the other Papke Inc. found 
> general meanings in numerology:
> for example: 4 is the 4th chakra - the chakra of the heart. You can find 
> the symbol for heart in the 4 itself, later in the book they say (I'm on f2v!).

As before, I continue to commend Papke & Co for trying hard to read the 
text as it appears in the the SID files. Yet once they add in their own 
assumptions, things go awry: here, their introduced notion seems to be that 
the 4 / 8 / 9 shapes represent numbers - yet AFAICT there is no evidence to 
support this. On the contrary, that the 9 shape almost always appears 
word-terminal or word-initial strongly suggests that these are intended to 
be read as being closer to late medieval Tyronian notae (those few Latin 
shorthand symbols still in use circa 1400-1500) than to Arabic numbers per se.

All of which would seem to undermine any sense in which numerology could be 
usefully applied to understand the mindset of the VMs' author.

But my #1 criticism is simply that decoding Voynichese text by filling the 
gaps between a small dictionary of pictograms (however closely observed) 
does next to nothing to explain the statistical features of Voynichese 
observed over decades here: like, why '4o' and '89' appear so often, why 
line-initial, -middle & -final characters have different distributions, why 
Neal keys seem to appear in the top line of so many pages, etc etc. In 
short, even if this does explain what it claims to explain, that's still 
only roughly 10% of the VMs' behaviour covered - which is a long way short 
of a "smoking gun" crypto proof, or even of an art history proof.

All the same, the Papke "translation" of the VMs may indeed prove to be a 
repository of useful spiritual content for some people. But I would argue 
that this might equally well be true of Hermann Rorschach's ink blots (or 
perhaps even enneagrams), and for much the same reason: any personal 
transformation arising from it (for good or bad) is probably better to be 
attributed to the psychologist / psychoanalyst using it as a tool and to 
the subject's own desire to change.

Not that I would say that there are no pictograms hidden in the VMs' text 
itself - for example, the single many-eyed ornate gallows character seems 
most likely to me to represent Argos Panoptes. But that is surely far less 
controversial than claiming a decrypt for the whole VMs?
        http://www.theoi.com/Tartaros/ArgosPanoptes.html

FWIW, Quattrocento artists were (IIRC) well aware of this Argos/Argus, the 
giant with a thousand eyes: Bramante famously used it as a theme for a 
fresco in Milan's Rocchetta:-
        http://www.discountmilano.com/tour/Rinascimento/Castello/
        The Rocchetta is a fortress within a fortress surrounded on three
        sides by porticoes. The right one was constructed by the
        Florentine Benedetto Ferrini (1466- 1476) by order of Galeazzo
        Maria, the one opposite is by Filarete and the left one was begun
        by Bernardino da Corte in 1495 and finished by Bramante under
        the orders of Ludovico il Moro. From the courtyard, through an
        archway, one enters the Treasure Room, so called, because the
        ducal treasure was kept there. On the walls one can see the
        frescoes of the Lombard school and a damaged fresco by
        Bramante, showing Argus whit a hundred eyes guarding the
        door leading to a small room in which the most precious jewels
        of the Duke were kept.

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


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