Elmar Vogt’s new Voynich blog…

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Apart from Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich blogosphere has been far too quiet of late. Even Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Das Voynich Blog” is, despite some intriguing posts in the past, fairly subdued.

And so it is a breath of fresh air to see a new blog from an old friend: long-time Voynich mailing list member Elmar Vogt has recently started up his Voynich Thoughts blog. Elmar has already posted a whole heap of nice snippets, such as the German Wikipedia entry’s comparison of the plant on f56r with drosera intermedia (which I mentioned here and here), a nice comparison of the Sagittarius archer with a drawing in a 15th century woodcut, as well as a circa-1450 head-dress comparison with a zodiac nymph.

Part of me really wants him to put these fragments into context – for the Sagittarius page, for example, how it was suggested long ago that the zodiac motifs might well have largely been copied from a (probably 14th century?) German woodcut calendar; a discussion of the Sagittarius archer’s (probably 14th century and fairly rustic) crossbow; plus a wider comparison of the crossbowman’s headwear with (say) the 15th century “turban” / chaperon as depicted by Robert Campin and Van Eyck.

Yet another part of me simply wants Elmar to fill his blog with that thing he does so very well – which is to use his keen logical eye and pleasantly acid German wit to be entertainingly tart about Voynichological nonsense. Wherever contemporary haruspicators pop up to read their imagined stories into the VMs’ well-scanned entrails, I’ll always be delighted to read Elmar’s commentary.

Trivia time: it’s no great secret that software developer Elmar has long contributed text edits to Wikipedia (such as its VMs page) under the monicker “Syzygy“: but what is perhaps less known is that, as a fan of the Atari ST, he chose this as a homage to the company Atari – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney used “Syzygy Engineering” for their original company name.

Hmmm… I’m not sure he’d be much impressed by the two computer games I wrote for the ST: 3D Pool and Loopz. Oh well!  🙂

Voynich f56r Sundew [updated]…

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I recently posted about the image of Voynich Manuscript page f56r on the Wikipedia page for the plant Sundew, and idly wondered where this new identification had come from.

Well… the answer turns out to be page 9 of the, errrm, snappily-titled 2007 book “The Curious World of Carnivorous Plants: A Comprehensive Guide to their Biology and Cultivation” (Timber Press) by Wilhelm Barthlott, Stefan Porembski, Rudiger Seine and Inge Theisen. Pretty much as I guessed, it was the plant’s set of (apparently thigmotropic) tentacles that convinced them of the match, which is fair enough.

This is consistent with the conclusions I drew in my book, which would indeed predict that (as a Herbal A page) the plant depicted probably is a plant (as opposed to something completely different disguised as a plant). You can also see where the heavy blue paint on the page has been contact transferred across to the facing page f55v (and in the opposite direction too): which is interesting, because f55v is a Herbal B page, and so the two pages were probably bound out of order. And so whereas the blue paint would very probably have been added after being misbound, the green paint might well be original (but it’s hard to be sure).

Incidentally, it was the oddly geometrical layout of the sundew-like tentacles on f56r that reminded Stan Tenen of the “1/r” spiral (the inverse or hyperbolic spiral), apparently a useful way of visualising the kind of whole-number fractions used by Ancient Egyptians for their maths. As a yet-further aside, this kind of inverse sequence reminds me of Keely‘s amazing claims, which form a part of Andrea Peters‘ book “The Voynich Solution” which I briefly mentioned here. All grist for the Voynichological mill!

Voynich f56r Sundew…?

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Someone with more confidence than I have in Voynichian botanical identification has put an image of f56r on the Wikipedia page for Sundew. Presumably the key feature match was the plant’s alien-style sticky tentacles, that bend forward when they’re touched by prey to entrap it (yes, it’s a carnivorous plant), a mechanism you’ll be delighted to know goes by the name of thigmotropism.

Hmmm… what if there are other carnivorous plants depicted in the VMs? All of a sudden, might our manuscript have acquired a “Little Shop of Horrors” cachet? Altogether now: “Feed me, Seymour… feed me now!“