Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 7	[1992 January 7]
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Speculative notes on the Subject of the MS

What is the Voynich manuscript about?  We haven't a clue, really,
but that need not stop us from speculating.  I'd like to mumble
on about three things: whether the text describes the illustrations,
what the illustrations suggest, and what they do not suggest.

The copies I have seen (almost all in Brumbaugh) strongly suggest
that the illustrations were done first, then the text.  Look, for
instance, at f93r (p80), how the text is fitted around the plant.
Look also at the unevenness of the left margin in f82r (p104).
It's much harder to decide whether the text is about the drawings.
But one thing is obvious: Brumbaugh's contention (p140) that the
author repeated gibberish to fill out paragraphs is not supported
by the reproductions.  There is ample space left on the page in 
both f49r and f93r, as there is also in f85r (p54) and f100v (p96).
And look at f81r (p9).  Why is the right margin so big?  Maybe the
reason is that the copyist was deliberately stretching a fixed text
to fill the space, making the lines shorter so there would be more
of them.  And he miscalculated slightly, for the last line runs
over by at least two words.  Look also at the frontispiece, the
reproduction of pisces.  In the outer ring are nineteen chubby
tubbies, and the writer clearly went to a lot of trouble to
squeeze the last of them in - her name is obviously one word
broken across two lines.

I'm not good at reading the script yet, but I checked the text
of two sections - f100r (p96) herbal and f82v (p104) "allegorical".
In the former folio, of 19 words attached to figures, I found three
repeated exactly in the text, and four more that differed only in
the ending of the word.  In the latter, I again found four words
from the drawings repeated in the text.  By way of comparison, I
checked a couple of chapters of the Book of Coming Forth By Day
against their attached drawings. In one, of eight words in the
drawing, five were found in the hieroglyphic text, two of them
spelled slightly differently.  In the other, of ten words, six
were repeated, one with a different determinative.  That's close,
don't you think?

[Note: no, it's not close, because it makes the same unproven
assumption, namely that the physical units of text are semantic
units of meaning.  By my argument, the Works of Shakespeare are
really a dictionary, because every word in Shakespeare can also
be found in the dictionary.]

Well, what are the drawings about?  I make these conjectures:

Plants: this seems so typical of an herbarium or pharmacopoeia
that I can't think of any alternative.

Zodiac: D'Imperio gives the count of figures, and every month
has 30 (except poor pisces, with 29).  That strongly suggests
these figures have a calendrical basis, so if they are astrological
they aren't about ephemerides or horoscope casting; they're more
likely to be "Rudolph's Lucky Days for 1607".  Incidentally, there
are a lot of similarities between the labels on the piscean nymphs
and the labels on the drawings of f82v.  Otherwise, I might
conjecture that the names are star names, and that most of them
begin with "oqp-" because most star names begin with "al-".

Astronomical: here also the two examples I have seem calendric.
The diagram on f68r is a circle divided into eight segments, four
with single stars and four with groups of stars.  The text starts
in the middle of the NW segment, which has the largest star.  I
think this stands for "spring", the eight segments are for the
quarter and cross-quarter days, and the diagram is oriented so
you rotate it counter-clockwise to read the text.  Incidentally,
if the circumscribed text starts at the vernal equinox, then the
top is approximately May Day and the bottom approximately All
Saints Day; the connotations with "witchcraft" are clear.

The diagram on f67r (p66) has a similar structure, but with two
strange differences: it is divided into 24, and the text in the
segments is the other way up: the ascenders point clockwise
around the circle.  I think it has something to do with the 12
months.

Nymphs and Plumbing: I can't offer a better suggestion than
"anatomical", but some instinct tells me that's wrong.

Miscellaneous:  all I have left is f85r (p54), labelled
"biological drawing".  But the four strange cell-like structures
are decorated with, respectively, a bird in flight, a bird brooding
beneath a tree, a man, and a woman.  Is this part of a creation
allegory based on the Book of Genesis, with the bird representing
Ruach Elohim, the Breath of God?  If so, perhaps the structures
are fountains, and the streams are not the four winds, but the
four rivers of Paradise.  Wild conjecture.

[Note: in retrospect, I think the wild conjectures were a lot
better founded than my clumsy attempts at rational analysis!]

Finally, the famous invalid argumentum a silentio: what can we
deduce from what isn't in the MS?

Alchemy: almost every Western alchemical text is littered with
pictures, mandalas, figurae, emblemata &c. If any part of the
MS is about alchemy, where is the pelican?  the lion couchant?
the caput mortuum? - and about a zillion more that you can see
for yourself in the Mutus liber.

Ceremonial Magic: again, every treatise, from the Picatrix already
mentioned through the Clavicula solomonis and the Grimoirum papae
honorii, has pentacles, pseudo-Hebrew spells, "lines, circles,
scenes, squares" and the like.  As far as I know, there are none
in the Voynich folios.

[Note: the partial quotation is from Marlowe's 'Dr Faustus'.]

Music:  If the text is music, why are there no drawings of musical
instruments or singers?  Why don't the nymphs have trumpets or
lyres?

(Actually, I think some parts are a treatise on millinery: "One
Hundred Fashionable Hats: How to make them, and Where to Wear them.
Guaranteed Waterproof.")

Robert