I am referring, of course, to the opinion (put forward by the highly respected herbal historian Sergio Toresella) that the Voynich Manuscript was in some way connected with the family of “alchemical herbal” manuscripts. Might Sergio have been basically right about this, but not in the way he expected?
If you weren’t actually taking notes during the Alchemical Herbal 1.0.1 lecture, here’s a quick recap to bring you up to speed:
- there are about seventy known examples of alchemical herbals
- most were made in the 15th century (a few 14th, some 16th)
- all bar two were made in the Veneto area in Northern Italy
- the plants are mostly real, but accompanied by nutty visual puns
- the plant names are, essentially, evocative nonsense
- some copies have recipes attached to some/most of the plants
- such recipes are often magical spells or incantations
- nobody knows why the alchemical herbals were made at all
Given that Toresella thinks the Voynich Manuscript was written in a North Italian humanistic hand typical of the second half of the fifteenth century, it’s hard not to notice the long list of similarities between it and the alchemical herbals. However – and here’s the tricky bit – the question I’m posing here is whether Toresella might have been right about this connection, but not at all in the way he expected.
The Layout Is The Message
Over the years, I’ve discussed a good number of places in the Voynich Manuscript where it seems to have been copied. My argument for this (running right back to The Curse of the Voynich) is based on places where I believe voids in the predecessor document have been copied through to the Voynich Manuscript itself.
For example, I would argue that the man-made hole (the same one that Toresella concluded [quite wrongly, I think] had been rubbed through the vellum in a sexual frenzy) was in fact a copy of a hole that had had been elaborated around in the predecessor document. Similarly, I think a large space running down the page edge in Q20 was highly likely to be a copy of a (probably stitched) vertical tear in the predecessor document. (Which is also why I think we can tell that the predecessor document was also written on vellum, because you can’t stitch paper.)
Codicologically, the overall conclusion I draw is quite subtle: from all this, I believe one of the key design criteria driving the way the Voynich Manuscript was constructed was to allow the writer to retain the predecessor document‘s layout. In short: Layout Is King.
But this has a rather odd logical implication. Similarly to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The Medium Is The Message”, might it be the case here that, in fact, The Layout Is The Message? By which I mean: might it be that Voynich researchers have spent such a long time looking for matches with the plants, when in fact the important detail was actually the shape of the void on the page that had been filled in by the plants?
What I’m suggesting here is not only that the plants chosen to fill in the voids on the Voynich Manuscript’s pages might largely be meaningless filler (literally), but also that I suspect we might possibly also be able – with a bit of herbal help from Sergio Toresella and others – to use the shapes of these voids to reconstruct the plants that had originally filled them.
And if we can identify any page’s original plant, we would have a gigantic source crib that would suggest a block paradigm match with any recipe associated with that plant, particularly from any of the (relatively small) number of herbals that have recipe text attached to that plant. So you should be able to see where I’d like to go forward with this. 🙂
The 98 Secret Herbs And Spices
All the same, I suspect more than a few Cipher Mysteries readers are now thinking something along the lines of “well, even if that kind of approach is theoretically possible, it must surely be impossible in practice“.
And without any additional information to work with, I’d basically agree. However, I also think we have a large number of additional angles we can pursue in combination with this that might offer up the kind of additional information we would need to narrow down our overall search space.
The first one is the list of 98 named plants that Vera Segre Rutz lists as being present in the bulk of alchemical herbal manuscripts. Philip Neal helpfully offers up a list of these 98 plants:
- Herba Antolla minor
- Herba Bortines
- Herba Torogas
- Herba Nigras
- Herba Stellaria
- […]
…all the way through to Herba Consolida mayor and Herba Consolida minor. On the face of it, these might appear to be of no use to us at all. However, I have long argued that the way that Herbal A pages are mixed up with Herbal B pages tends to confuse many issues: and it is a little-known fact that there the Herbal A pages contain 95 drawings of plants (and that there is also a Herbal A folio missing, bringing the total up to 97 or so drawings).
And so I strongly wonder whether the 97 or so Herbal A drawings (or rather their underlying voids) correspond to Segre Rutz’s 98 plants in the mainstream of the alchemical herbal tradition. Otherwise it’s a coincidence, for sure, and nobody likes coincidences much.
Again, you may object that this is not specific enough to be helpful. However, I’d point out that the alchemical herbal plants were very often included in specific orders: and that even if all the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios have ended up in the wrong order, every pair of images on consecutive pages is guaranteed to be in the right order (i.e. the recto side then verso side of the same folio).
It might well be that an inspired guess plus a bit of cunning detective work will be enough to build the crucial missing linkage here. After all, we don’t need much.
Punning Clans
Puns (specifically visual puns) are another key way we might able to find a way in here. Toresella, in his “Gli erbari degli alchimisti”, lists examples where alchemical herbal drawings reflect the name of the plant, e.g. Herba Brancha Lupina can have its root stylized to look like a wolf. Here’s a wolf-root from Vermont MS 2 (as discussed by Marco Ponzi):
Note I’m not suggesting here that we should literally look for exact parallels in the Voynich Manuscript. However, my guess is that the intellectual temptation offered to the author by the chance to include / adapt / appropriate visual puns when creating filler plant drawings would be almost impossible to turn down.
And so I’m wondering whether there might turn out to be entire families (nay, clans) of Voynich herbal drawings that contain curious punny echoes of the original (though now invisible) herbal drawings.
One visually striking example of the kind of thing I have in mind is the pairs of red-outlined eyes in the roots of Voynich Manuscript f17r. I’m specifically wondering here whether these eyes might be a punny reference to Herba Bososilles (one of the alchemical herbal set of 98), which is – according to the paragraph of text in BNF Latin 17844 – good for the eyes. Here’s a picture with the coloured drawing from Canon Misc 408 with the text from BNF Latin 17844 cut’n’pasted below it:
Reminding vs Remembering
Ultimately, though, I have to say that I don’t believe that the plants we see on the pages of the Voynich Manuscript are likely to directly help us in the way that Voynich researchers over the last century (and more) have hoped. Calling them “phantasmagorical” (as I think Karen Reeds once did) may be technically accurate, but it is certainly practically unhelpful: we do not have long lists of phantasmagorical 15th century mss to compare it with.
The primary function of these plant drawings, I therefore suggest, may well lie not in their literality (i.e. in their ability to encode external information, to remember information for the author), but in their evocativity (i.e. their ability to stimulate recollection, to remind the author of that-which-was-there-before).
If this is right, we must find ways of resisting the temptation to try to literally read what we see in these plant pages, and instead attempt to start looking at them far more indirectly. Who know what we will see out of the sides of our eyes?
Nick,
to say it bluntly: I think you are wrong. In your scenario someone must have copied the ms., copying a script layout and would have filled in the drawings.. One of the things we can be reasonably sure of is that the plant drawings were made before the written parts were added.
And just two remarks about Toresella: T. is ignoring the Corpus of Eurropean Herbal and recipe texts, which are much more likely to have been the base of the VMs. Herbal texts and the second half of the c. Humanistica ignores the C14 dating and the fact that scientific mss. were written in Gothic scripts.
I agree that the drawings may have been intended as a memory jogger. If, as I strongly suspect, the ms was meant for sight-reading by its author, and if the coding method is prone to some ambiguity, then a picture can disambiguate one word from another where both are written the same way. English abounds with examples: ‘line’ can be a verb or a noun and each can have many meanings.
In passing – a ‘herbal’ remedy commonly encountered in old ms is made from laurel aka bay leaves.
My hypothesis is that the VM was written using an abbreviation method of the writer’s own invention. It is complex in that symbols – glyphs if you prefer – can vary in their interpretation depending on whether they are initials, medials, finals or isolates. Also, some symbols may perform double duty, for example: a single symbol may represent L or T, depending on context.
I am currently writing programs to compare n-gram frequency patterns in the VM with patterns in Latin. The results are promising. My latest blog may be of interest:-
https://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/understanding_the_voynich_manuscript_1-238934
In my next blog I shall show how a cluster of visually similar VM words relate to a cluster of semantically related Latin inflections. This textual and visual analysis forms a crib which enables the transcription of some key VM symbols into Latin letters.
Constructive criticism of my hypothesis and method is most welcome.
Helmut: as to your first point, I don’t think the two drawing-order scenarios are mutually exclusive (and I don’t even think I described the scenario you put forward as mine). Simply, a fake drawing mimicking the overall layout could be drawn just as well first or second – and, as I recall, we see examples of both drawing orders appearing in the Voynich Manuscript (I’m sure Rene can clarify). So I’m not currently too concerned by this.
Your second point: why do you think Sergio Toresella “is ignoring the Corpus of Eurropean Herbal and recipe texts”? He travelled the world looking at herbals and writing about them, he basically wrote the book on this whole subject. What exactly do you think he was overlooking here?
Your third point: it is entirely true that Sergio’s identification of a humanistic hand dating the handwriting to post-1450 is not *exactly* aligned with the radiocarbon dating, but that’s sometimes the way the cookie crumbles with historical and technical dating evidence: radiocarbon dating in particular is far less of an ‘exact historical science’ than its strongest proponents would have you believe. Incidentally, when I asked Sergio about this, he said that there was a herbal from Milan he had worked with that had an extremely similar writing style, and it is my huge regret that I still do not know which specific herbal he was referring to. Regardless, I do not think that this relatively small difference of technical opinion gives you even remotely strong enough reason to reject the sumtotal of his observations and thoughts, given after a lifetime of working with herbal manuscripts.
The plants are basically identical. I still do not really understand what should be alchemical. JKP and Rene have already done some work here. I am interested in the text, and what they were used for, as well as the time when they were to be used. And that it is of German origin, which makes for me a connection to the VM.
http://viridisgreen.blogspot.com/2017/04/
What we regard as a recipe, actually not a recipe. It simply lacks the quantities. It also lacks the pharmacist abbreviation. Even if he replaced them with new symbols, it would be noticeable, because they would only occur here, but it does not. When reading recipes, this is immediately noticeable, even if you do not really understand it.
What’s left are disease descriptions. If that and that happens, that’s it.
There is still the provision section. Do not do that or you will get it.
Peter, we cannot be sure that the VMS lacks quantities. It’s possible that something like dain/daiin (or one of the other repeating patterns) means something like drachma II, drachma III.
That’s just an example, I’m not saying the dain sequences represent numbers, only that some of the repeating patterns (like daiin, nccc, and others) could potentially be numbers.
Roman numerals are letters. Greek numerals are letters. Hebrew numerals are letters. They didn’t start using number-shapes that were separate from letters until later in the 14th century.
I understand what you mean, but then they should not be in the zodiac or astrology.
A recipe contains different amounts, mass and medium.
1 lot xxx, 3 lot yyy, 4 lot zzz etc.
With so many recipes, a pattern would have to play, but it does not. Therefore, in my opinion, they are not recipes.
Peter: that’s the kind of conclusion you can easily be pushed towards if you assume that Voynichese is a simple language, which it most certainly isn’t.
If the zodiac-figures section is calendrical information, or bloodletting-schedule information, or easter-computation information, or good-and-bad-days-to-do things according to the stars then it’s quite possible that it includes numbers.
Is already clear Nick. Most of what we know consists of 80% guesses. It also does not allow many opportunities where to place the crowbar at this safe. Anyway, steady drops hollow the stone.
Based on my knowledge of the VM, it generally corresponds to the other herbal books. It also does not exceed tolerance when comparing other books. It also gives me no reason why I should leave too far.
I also assume that it is understood by a second person without much effort. It makes no sense if the key at the end has more pages than the manuscript itself. It can be said anywhere that it could ………………….., but Soberly, it just can not. Compared to other manuscripts.
Helmut Winkler on June 19, 2019 at 9:55 am said:
“Nick, to say it bluntly: I think you are wrong. In your scenario someone must have copied the ms., copying a script layout and would have filled in the drawings.. One of the things we can be reasonably sure of is that the plant drawings were made before the written parts were added”.
Helmut, to say it bluntly: I think you are wrong. Here is an example showing at least here the text was written BEFORE the drawings:
https://hungergj.home.xs4all.nl/catoblepas/text%20before%20drawing.htm
Ger Hungerink
https://hungergj.home.xs4all.nl/catoblepas/Ashmole1469.jpg
Hi ant’s. MS – 408 is not a herbarium. It’s not alchemy either. It’s not even astrology. It is not even a book about herbs. It is important to read what is written in the text. And then you understand that everything is different than you see. 🙂
@Josef Zlatoděj Prof.
I have to say your website has improved by 30%. Now that I’m mentioned on the same line as Rene and Nick, it looks a lot better.
But unfortunately the rest is still crap.
@peter……So to be clear, boy. You can never understand the manuscript.
You know why ? Because the manuscript is written and encrypted in the Czech language. Bullshit you write.
The fact that the manuscript is written in the Czech language is written on many his pages.
I translated the manuscript completely. And so I know what it is written about.
You’ve been writing just 100 percent stupid for a long time.
The rare Voynich is a work of natural magic. It is not meant to be read but is a collection of mnemonic devices . This guy is on the right tract!
Giordano Bruno would have also known this work.
Hello Nick,
Firstly, thank you for bringing us up-to-date with your bulleted summary of the knowledge in regards to alchemical herbals. I wanted to wrote and ask where this information comes from? Are you quoting from Sergio Toresella, or are there outside sources? Likewise, from what source from Segre Rutz are you summarizing your work from? I am not asking for a line-by-line citation process, but a bibliography of relevant readings from the two authors would be greatly appreciated. I ask because I am doing work in a similar vein to this and would like to learn about alchemical herbals. If this is evident somewhere on the site that I have overlooked, I apologize for my ignorance. Thank you again for both your specific article here and your work dealing with historical ciphers in general as it is a fascinating branch of research.
-Tom
Hello Nick, thank you for remembering and citing my father’s work; also published on my birthday, a gift I really appreciate! He passed way 7 years ago and apart his already published articles he left all his writings, notes and archive in a total a mess; also his library is indeed organized, but his thoughts on books and articles are in MS-DOS! I have not been able yet to recover, study and arrange his work, so I’m not able to deepen his point of view on this subject. BUT in the meantime (August ’21), the BL Sloane MS 1902, (Philosophicae Hermeticae Medulla by John & Arthur Dee) has been decoded, by Piorko and Bean! And thanks to the code used in this alchemical manuscript with images they could realate directly to the same used in Edinburg MS Dc.1.30 and MS Ashmole 1423 at the Bodleian. A huge leap!