Search Results: Zodiac

I’ve spent some time recently revisiting the Voynich Manuscript’s labelese, as well as its Pisces zodiac roundel page, and thinking about how that might relate to February. However, making all of these parallel strands “land” at the same time has proved difficult: even if the zodiac labels are some kind of cisiojanus “syllable soup”, we still have many practical problems linking everything together into one solid decryption.

Still, having now spent some time putting February’s “Bri pur bla sus” saint’s days and festivals under the microscope, it’s becoming apparent that many of these Christian saints were martyred virgins: and so perhaps the whole notion of oddly-angelic naked nymphs isn’t as far away from the subject matter as you might at first think.

Moreover, having thought about the really important feast days associated with men, I’m coming round to the idea that perhaps these may be connected to the few “male nymphs”. I’m thinking specifically about whether the beardy breastless nymph below might be connected with February 22nd, Cathedra Petri [the Feast of St Peter’s Seat].

So I’m now coming round to wonder: if the (relatively few) male nymphs in the zodiac section are broadly linked to specifically male feast days, might we be able to use them to reconstruct the nymph numbering? (i.e. which nymph is linked with which day.)

But before launching into that, I thought it would be good to see what people had previously posted on this general topic.

Notes on Nymph Numbering

D’Imperio mentions (3.3.3) that Peterson noted that some of the nymphs might be male: but doesn’t seem to mention trying to reconstruct the correct order of the nymphs.

Going through the voynich.net archives reveals various observations:

• Rene Z [15 Aug 1997]: “The nymphs were drawn from the inside ring outwards, with the text added either immediately or afterwards. I think there are two possibilities for the order: either starting near 00:00 and going clockwise or starting near 09:00 and going against the clock, this from observing where the nymphs are more cramped together (especially the inner circle of Sagittarius).”
• Rene Z [15 Aug 1997] “There is one nymph in Gemini without a label. I would favour the idea that this was a simple oversight. There is also one nymph without a star somewhere…”
• John Grove [05 Oct 1997]: “In the June and December pages, the first nymph outside the circle has a ‘carpet’ under her feet. If you read the calendar from the inside out (as I have had a tendancy to do), these two nymphs occur 5 (for June) and 4 (for December) — days? — before the end of the zodiac month.”
• Rene Z [1 Oct 1998]: “In the zodiac section, the standing nymphs all have their right hands either pointing backwards or placed on their hips.”
• Rene Z [18 Jan 1999]: “About 1 out of 6 of the standing nymphs have their hand pointing behind them, not on the hip. But for nine-pointed stars this fraction is zero. I checked that the probability of this is 0.02 if this was just due to chance.”

One thread also suggested looking here at a woodcut in: Paul Heitz (Hg.), Einblattdrucke des 15. Jh., Bd. 18: Richard Schmidbauer, Einzel-Formschnitte des 15. Jh. in der Staats-, Kreis- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, Straßburg 1909, Taf. 9. Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jh., Leipzig 1925-1930, Nr. 1883a. However, Google Books didn’t seem to have a copy of this, alas.

I also found a VoynichViews blog post that highlighted a specific Sagittarius nymph holding her star downwards.

Please feel free to point me towards any posts that specifically discuss issues around determining / reconstructing the correct order of the Voynich zodiac nymphs, because (for example) I had no luck finding anything on voynich.ninja.

However, most of the interesting thoughts on the (old) list were in a single 1999 post by Jorge Stolfi: he wondered if he could discern any visual clues that signalled which was the first nymph of each zodiac page. So I decided to copy the whole post here as a section in its own right…

Jorge Stolfi’s thoughts [21 Jan 1999]

(Here’s what Jorge Stolfi posted on the subject of nymph numbering back in 1999):

Yesterday I thought that those nymphs might mark the starting point
for reading each ring of stars. Now that I have looked at those cases
with some care I am not so sure. Anyway, here are the cases that I
could see:

70v2 Pisces

 There is one nymph with both arms raised at 00:15 in
 the inner band.

 I would say that this is the most likely starting point for
 the inner star sequence, which runs clockwise (agreeing with
 the text). Thus I think that the inner parade begins with
 Miss Otalar (stretched arm), and ends with Miss Otaral
 (facing clockwise)

 This is another anomaly of Pisces, since in the
 other diagrams the starting point seems to be around 10:30. I
 suppose tha the last nymph at 11:30 was reversed so that it
 would face the "honor spot" at noon.

 The starting point of the outer band is not so obvious. I
 would say it is near the top, too, but it could be before,
 after, or in the middle of the four "baby" nymphs.

f70v1 Aries “dark”

 Here all nymphs have the right hand on the hip; several have
 the left hand down too. My guess for the starting point is at
 10:30 in both bands, i.e. Miss Otalchy (the Tar Am Dy) and
 Miss Okoly. Note that they (and only they) are holding their
 high enough to intrude into the surrounding text ring.
 Moreover Miss Okoly is wearing a striped sleeve (or
 whatever).

 Note again that the label at 06:00 is not obviously
 associated with any star, so it must be attached to one of
 the nymphs. I would say that, going clockwise, each label is
 associated with the preceding nymph.

f71r Aries light

 Here all nymphs have the same pose: right arm
 on the hip, left arm up and holding the star.
 The stars have no tails, except for the outer 04:30
 one that has a very short one.

 The starting point for each text ring is clearly marked by
 the "notched square" device, which occurs in other cosmo
 diagrams, presumably with the same function.

 As I argued in my previous message, this is the zodiac page
 with the most "primitive" style.

f71v Taurus “light”

 Here too all nymphs have the same pose. I see no obvious
 "start" marker for the nymphs, except perhaps for the
 decorated dustbin of Miss Otalody, the inner nymph at 00:00.

 However the outer text ring has a wider gap at 10:30 (the
 "standard" starting place), with a centered dot which may be
 the last vestige of the notched square symbol.

 To my eyes, the style of this page is only a bit less primitive than that
 of f71r.

f72r1 Taurus “dark”

 The outer nymph at 02:30 has her right arm stretched back and
 down; all the others have the right hand on the hip or inside
 the dustbins.

 There are no obviosu start markers that I can see, but the
 reproduction I have is unreadable around 03:00. There is
 anextra wide gap in the inner parade around 10:30, but that
 may be a consequence of the "cigarette hole" and its visual
 pun. Other plausible candidates are the nymphs at 00:00, Miss
 Otchoshy and Miss Oaiin Ar-Ary.

 I would say that the figures on the outer band of this
 diagram are the first attempts by the artist at drawing
 full-body naked women.

f72r2 Gemini

 My copy is almost illegible. I can see on the outer band one
 naked nymph at 10:30, Miss Okar-Aldy, with the right arm
 stretched out. That seems to be the "standard" starting
 position in several other diagrams.

 Most of the other nymphs have the right hand on the hip. Some
 have the right arm back and down, bent or straight, but it is
 questionable whether this pose is significantly different
 from hand-on-hip. The extreme case is the figure at 06:30 on
 the outer band, Miss (or Master?) Otarar (dressed, standing
 on an horizontal tube); the first of four dressed figures.
 Miss Ofchdamy, the first of the five "extra" nymphs at the top,
 may be another significant exception, but her
 forearm is not visible on my copy.

f72r3 Cancer

The outer nymph at 11:00, miss Otchy(?)-Daiin, has the right
arm stretched back and down at 45 degrees. She may well be the
leader of that band; there is a wide gap between her and the 
preceding nymph at 09:30.

I cannot see any other nymph with stretched right arm, but 
half of the nymphs are just faint blurs on my copy. 

f72v3 Leo

I see two ladies with the right arm stretched back and down at
45 degrees, bot on the inner band: Miss Oky at 11:30,
and Miss Oteeod(?) at 06:15.  

There is no obvious starting point, but the diagram is 
cut by multiple creases between 07:00 and 10:30, which seems
a natural place to start.

f72v2 Virgo

This seems to be a very complicated month astronomically 8-)
There are many nymphs in new and strange poses, and even a freak
reappearance of the dustbin (shallow, with "cutaway" edge).

I can see several nymphs with the right arm stretched back and
down at 45 degrees.  In the outer band there are Opaiin at 08:30,
and Ofchdy-Sh. at 05:00.  In the inner band we have four consecutive
nymphs starting at 05:00 (Cheosy, Ofcheey, Yteedy, On-Aiin).

However we also have a nymph at 00:15, Miss Oeedy, with *both*
arms stretched back, and hands clasped behind her.  Three 
nymphs (outer Oeedey and Oeeo-Daiin at 10:30-10:45, inner
Oka*** at 10:30) are grasping their stars with both hands;
and inner Okeeom at 01:30 is almost doing the same.

f72v1 Libra

Miss Oteoly at 10:30 on the outer band (the "standard" starting
place), has the right arm stretched back and down. But so do
Miss Okeeoly at 01:00 and Miss Okal at 11:00.

In the inner band the nymphs are holding their right hand in
various positions near the hip; none seems to have a clearly
"stretched-out" arm. The one that comes closest is Miss Oko**y
at 03:30, but she is bending down to avoid the "cigarette
hole", and the hand position my be accidental. In any case
that hole would be a natural starting place for the inner band.

f73r Scorpio

Outer Misses Dolshey and Opaiin at 08:00-09:00 have outstretched
right arms. The latter is more exhuberant and holds a bigger
star.  09:00 could be a starting place in this case.

Ladies Shekal, Okeedy and Okedal at 05:00-06:30 outer band, 
have stretchde arms.  They cannot be all starting points...

In the ineer band, the stretched-arm ladies are Miss Chek and
Miss Kar (not their real names, I am sure 8-) Miss Kar, by the
way, is the one who was involved in the cigarette hole affair
with Taurus girl, as reported bove.

Outside the diagram, at the top, there are Miss Chockhy and 
Miss Yteeody; the latter may a full stop, hardly a start marker...

f73v Sagittarus

I see only three ladies with stretched arms here. In the outer
band we have Miss Ykeody at 02:00 and Miss Okeody at 10:00; the
latter may well be the band leader. In the inner band I see only
Miss Otal at 03:00.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been grinding my way through the Cisiojanus entries for February (mainly from the Usuarium website). However, it turns out that there is far less variation than I supposed. For example, “Ig” (on the 1st February) appears in only a single missal (FR Noyon 1541, Missale Noviomense). And even though St Walburga is listed in some volkskalenders, I haven’t seen “Wal” appear in an single Cisiojanus mnemonic for February 25th. And finally, many of what I first thought were variants are actually nothing more than transcription errors.

Anyway, here’s my current list for February circa 1400-1450:

Note that the four starred days are the ones I’ve seen written in red on some (but not all) calendars: most have only one or two red days.

My original plan was to compare these mnemonic syllables with the labels for the Voynich Manuscript’s f70v2. However, this simply doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I’ve tried to line up ot/ok in labels with male saints vs female saints, or with virgin martyrs, but nothing seems to match.

I’ve also looked for (more traditional Art History) subject matches (e.g. St. Apollonia is associated with toothache, St Brigid with protection, blacksmithing, livestock, dairy, etc) in the “nymph” drawings, but so far have found zilch. [The outer ring ‘nymph’ at around 4 o’clock appears to have a beard and no breasts so I’d guess is male, but might he be St Peter? It’s not a very convincing argument, I cannot deny it.]

I’ve also been thinking about this with reference to the Volkskalender B family of manuscripts I discussed here many years ago. For example, BSB Cgm 28, or St Gallen Cod. Sang. 760, or Zurich Ms C. 54 [which has a Cisiojanus column], Pal. Germ. 291, and so on. But this too feels like it’s a busted flush: computus aside (calculating Easter), there’s really not a lot to work with there, calendar-wise.

What’s Left?

My “Attack the Fish!” post mentioned Fribourg Ms L. 309, which inspired commenter Peter Moesli to look beyond the calendar page in that manuscript. He found a health tip for February there: “Beware of the cold and do not wash your head or cut your hair“.

All I feel I currently have left is wondering whether this health tip is broadly the type of ‘secret’ we should be looking for as a possible text match for the rings of the zodiac pages. The Pisces page, for example, has three circular rings, which would amount to roughly 5/6 lines of text. So if these rings are where the actual ‘payload’ is located, it’s surely not a very big payload.

Bah.

In a comment to my last post, I remarked that I suspect the labels on the pages with the zodiac roundels might be verbosely-enciphered syllables of a cisiojanus mnemonic. As an example of how this might work, I expanded out “cisiojanus epi sibi vendicat”: unfortunately, this was for January, and January was (circa 1400-1450) associated with Aquarius, which – along with Capricorn – is one of the two zodiac signs that were (probably) removed from the Voynich Manuscript, alas.

Consequently I need to pick a different target. Hence my plan is to Attack The Fish! (i.e. Pisces, f70v2)

So, what I’ll be doing over the next few days / weeks (though I sincerely hope not months) is exploring the world of Cisiojanus through a fishy February lens. This will involve understanding the saints, syllables, languages, traditions etc. For example, February 1st celebrates St Brigide v. [“v.” = virginis], February 2nd is Purificatio Marie (this is Candlemas, celebrated 40 days after Christmas, which is the day Mary went to the Temple in Jerusalem to be purified, following Jewish law), 5th is for St Agatha, 9th for St Appolonia, and so on.

For anyone wanting to come along for the ride, here’s a link to February from (arguably) the nearest example of an astronomical calendar we have, i.e. the “Astronomical medical calendar in German (Studio of Diebolt Lauber at Hagenau, about 1430 – 1450)“. I haven’t yet read Rosy Schilling’s work on this, but I plan to do this very shortly. Similarly, here’s a cisiojanus column in a volkskalender February from Fribourg MS L. 309, another nice manuscript I’ve previously linked to here. There will be more, many more!

Just so you know, it’s easy to Google web pages with February cisiojanus manuscripts. This is because they typically start “bri pur blasus…” or “bri pur bla sus”. One exceptional source for liturgical calendar stuff is the Usuarium (here’s its page for February), which I hadn’t seen before today.

One of the enduring mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript’s enigmatic “Voynichese” script is that it varies. Not content with having two full-blown ‘languages’/’dialects’ (known as Currier A and Currier B), the way Voynichese ‘behaves’ on a glyph-level, word-level, line-level, paragraph-level, page-level and even section-level varies in many, many other ways (e.g. LAAFU etc).

This pervasive variability is an easy spanner to throw in the works of the kind of ‘simple [universal] explanation’ that gets periodically churned up for Voynichese – you know, mirrored High German, etc. No natural language structure could explain this variability – languages are stubbornly historical and offer students challenges on many levels, for sure, but Voynichese is just something else.

One of the many Voynichese variations is “labelese”: these are short words or phrases that appear to be attached to labels on complicated diagrams (normally with astronomical or zodiacal content, as per the dominant interpretation). Complicating the issue is that labelese can be juxtaposed with non-labelese, such as with this image from the “Aries” (f71r) page:

Here you can see some normal-looking (continuous) Voynichese (on the curved lines of text), together with some shorter labels (in EVA: okldam, oteoaldy, and oteolar). And you might possibly speculate from this that the continuous-looking Voynichese might be normal Voynichese language, and that the labelese might be some kind of simplified subset of Voynichese.

The reason for suspecting a subset is that you almost never see labelese words starting with (EVA) qo- (which is a hugely popular pattern in Currier B – so almost no qok- words or qot- words). And you often see l- initial words in some Currier B (particularly in Q13), which we can see here (but never in Currier A).

But… look again at the image. The outer band of text here runs “okeeedy oky eey okeodar okeoky oteody oto otol oteeyar“. And the inner band of text runs “ockhchy oteesaey lcheotey okarody shs“. The way that so many of these words (both in the labels and the continuous curved text) start with ok- / ot- is more than a bit suspicious, hein?

In fact, you might go so far as to suggest that labelese’s ok- words seem to broadly correspond to (say) Q20’s qok- words (I think that the labelese ok-/ot- ratio is about the same as the Q20 qok-/qot- ratio, but I haven’t checked).

In Q20, y- initial words tend to be the first words in a line (suggesting that there is some clever bastard trickery going on with line-initial glyphs), but in labelese we see very few. Perhaps labelese might be trying to disguise where each individual set of labels start?

So my thought for today is simply this: might ok- be a kind of labelese-specific null? In which case the original text might have been continuous text, which was then divided into small label-sized chunks and had an ok- prepended to most of them.

If Voynichese isn’t meaningless (and good luck to those who believe it is, that’s a fight you’ll have to fight without me), what language(s) is/are its plaintext written in?

Thinking about this recently, what struck me was how unsystematic (and unsatisfactory) most Voynich language presentations are. For example, discussions of Currier A and Currier B (the two major Voynichese language ‘styles’) typically seem to start too far along, by assuming what the relationship between A and B is before they even begin. So… how about we discuss what that relationship is, and what evidence we have?

Big questions about Currier A and Currier B

The specific differences between Currier A and B form a topic I’ve gone over many times, such as in this 2013 post and more recently in this 2019 post. And the idea that somehow the A ‘system’ evolved into/from the B ‘system’ is something that many researchers have discussed, e.g. Tim Rayhel [Glen Claston] had very strong views on this. Similarly, Rene Zandbergen has perhaps worked hardest to establish that there’s more of a technical spectrum between A and B. Rene has also noted that in some ways B seems to be a more verbose version of A: yet at the same time it is abundantly true that the two also behave in sharply different ways.

So I thought it might help to ask the most important questions about A and B in a more systematic way:

• Did A precede B, or did B precede A?
• Are A and B encoding/enciphering two different plaintext languages, or a single plaintext language?
  • If they encode/encipher a single plaintext language, how can we map between A text & B text?
• Do A pages exhibit internal evolution? If so, can we order A pages according to that evolution?
• Do B pages exhibit internal evolution? If so, can we order B pages according to that evolution?
• Might the differences between groups of A pages simply be down to their different topics / contents?
• Might the differences between groups of B pages simply be down to their different topics / contents?
• Even though Q13 is Currier B, do language differences separate Q13A pages from Q13B pages?
• Even though Q20 is Currier B, do language differences separate Q20A pages from Q20B pages?
• If A and B encipher different languages, was the enciphering system designed primarily for A or for B?
• If A and B encipher a single language, are all the differences just down to scribal choice?
• In A and B pages, is there any way to tell whether or not the first letter of a line is real or fake?

To try to explore these difficult (yet fundamental) questions, I’ll now look at a couple of specific behaviours that sharply differ between A and B, to see what those differences seem to tell us about these questions.

The two different daiin behaviours

If you pick out a normal-looking A page (say, f21v, which has a small amount of text accompanying a herbal drawing), you’ll see not only lots of “daiin” instances (six on f21v, two of which are a “daiin daiin” adjacent pair), but also odaiin, chodaiin, todaiin, cholchaiin, sheaiin and kchochaiin. These -aiin instances are located all over the page, as you would expect of words in a normal text.

But if you then go to a normal-looking B page (say, f103v, which is far more text-heavy than f21v) we see eight instances of daiin, six of which are on the left-hand edge (and none of which is on the first line of a paragraph).

Personally, I find these two different behaviours (one text-like, the other LAAFU-like) very hard to reconcile with the oft-floated idea that A and B are two sides of a single coin. This B-behaviour seems to imply that “aiin” (which, as Currier pointed out, is a common B word) is being modified with a “d-” line-initial prefix on B pages, thus making “daiin” an even rarer word in B pages than it might at first appear.

Or maybe there’s some other exotic LAAFU explanation I haven’t yet grasped here. (But I don’t think so.)

The two different -ed- behaviours

Rene Zandbergen’s observation that -ed- is rare in A pages (particularly Herbal A pages) but extremely common in B pages is also very hard to square with the idea that A and B are basically the same thing. I’d certainly agree that in early Herbal A pages, the two instances in the Takahashi transcription (f8r and f11r) both seem like scribal errors in the original rather than systematic -ed- examples.

Things get a little more complicated as you look further in to other A pages: f27v, f51r and f52r look like they have genuine -ed- instances (though the one on f56r looks like to me a scribal slip), while f65v has four -ed- instances. The astronomy section (A) has many more -ed- instances, as does the zodiac section (A), though the pharma section (A) is closer to the density of the Herbal A section.

So, if you were to use the ed-density to try to trace out the evolution of the A pages, I suspect you’d probably conclude that the order they were constructed in was: Herbal A, Pharma A, Astro A, Zodiac A. And then you’d probably conclude that the B pages (which have extraordinarily heavy ed-density throughout) were written after the A pages.

Evolution of a system

To my eyes, the changing way that -ed- appears in the A pages suggests that what we are glimpsing here is the evolution of a system, where new features are gradually introduced and diffused into practice. I further believe that this also implies the A pages were constructed before the B pages. Yet the huge step change in -ed- usage between A and B pages suggests to me that something quite different is going on in B pages.

Similarly, the vastly different ways that daiin appears in A and B pages (position-independent in A, position-dependent in B) also suggests to me that something very different is going on in B pages.

So, what is going on in B pages? Though this margin is far too small for me to come to a definitive conclusion, it currently seems to me to be in some way a combination of things. While the system itself definitely seems to have step-changed from A to B (which I think the daiin A/B behaviour argues for), I can’t yet rule out the possibility that this change in system may well have been driven by a change in plaintext language in B pages.

If you know of any Voynichese behaviours that you think help to illuminate, illustrate, or answer any questions on the list above, please leave a comment below, thanks!