Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 15	[1992 February 3]
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An Account of a Curious Dream concerning the Voynich Manuscript

Well, if you were not already persuaded that trying to decipher
the Voynich manuscript was the high road to gibbering lunacy,
this note should convince you.  If you don't like dreams, or
don't believe they convey meaning, stop now.  For I intend to
present the dream, an interpretation, and the evidence that it
is a genuine communication from the objective psyche.

Shortly before dawn, on 1992 February 2:

The Dream

I was in a grotto, in the basement of a building.  The room was
quite large, and had been landscaped with stones, shallow pools,
and running water.  There was a wooden walkway around part of the
room, made of narrow boards with gaps between.

I was looking for a ring.  It was a gold ring, but had been broken
into pieces and lost.  I was looking for it under water, in the
pools and streams, kneeling down and winnowing the water with my
fingers.  I found one piece, felt it and looked at it, but lost it
again.

It then occurred to me to talk about this with a woman I knew, who
lived in a room on the upper floor of the building, which I now
realised was three storeys high.  So I got up, dressed, and walked
towards the stairway.

Thre was a doorway in the wall, the lower edge about four feet off
the ground, through which the stair ran.  But the stair was retracted.
I turned a small lever on the wall, and the machinery began to lower
the stair down through the doorway and towards me.  There was a man
sitting on the stair, blocking my path, and as the stair came to rest
he was sitting just in the doorway.  At his feet, two small metal
containers were fixed to the stair, one either side, about six inches
tall, shaped like the frustrum of a cone, and each with three round holes
in the top.  They were salt and pepper shakers.  The man was holding a
mixture of salt and pepper in his hands, and letting it sift through
them.  It fell down, closed upon itself, and sifted back through the holes
and into the shakers.  The man was dressed in a very conservative dark
suit, like a butler in the old movies.

I knew the words that would get me by this entity, and climbed the
stair.  Halfway up, there was a door in the wall that had never been
there before (I was familiar with the building); the door was open and
behind it was what seemed to be a workroom, brightly lit.  As I passed
it, another entity came out and followed me.  I got to the ground floor
and closed the door behind me.  A mistake: the entity came forward,
helped me close the door by pulling from the other side, closed the
door through its body, and was now in the room with me.  It was a
man, dressed in light brown, workmen's clothes, with a cloth cap.
He was carrying a vacuum cleaner, and when I asked "What's that for"
he replied "The power's gone off"  And I understood that he intended
to operate the machine, so as to distract me with its noise.

I tried to elude him, to reach the second stair, that led to the
top floor of the building, where the woman had her room with a water
bed in it.  But before I reached the stair, the chanting began, the
sound of many voices, unseen.  The chant was clear: "We are waiting
for the Tochtermann", but it was mocking me, and it was enunciated
in the way I'd speculated the Voynich tongue was read:

	"Wearewai'un fortheTo'' chtermann'"

with three stresses, the middle one the strongest.  The chant rose
in volume, dissolved the building, and broke the dream.

The Interpretation

The dream describes a situation and conveys a message, and both seem
quite clear to me.  I detected two instances of substitution or
censorship, and shall reverse them.

The grotto is a very familiar place.  It is described by Homer as a
cave on the Isle of Ithaca; its name is the Cave of the Nymphs, and
in neopythagorean teaching it is at the entrance to the underworld.
The two floors above are the waking world and the realm of ideas, the
Platonic heaven.

The ring is the Ring of Thoth, the wearer of which can read all writing;
so clearly I am seeking the means to decipher something written.  The
ring is not gold; that was a substitution.  The fragment I held was
slightly less dense than gold, harder and springier, and was a rich
reddish-brown in hue.  That metal does not exist in the waking world,
but its look and feel are unmistakable: it is oreikhalkon.

The woman I decide to consult is one of the Voynich star nymphs; so
she has a room on the upper floor with a tub - again, a modern image
was substituted.  The stairs are therefore Jacob's Ladder, and must
be lowered to permit me to climb from the underworld to the heavens.

The entities that tried, successfully, to impede me are also familiar.
These beings, that can reverse entropy and make machines run without
power, whose weapon is empty noise, are described in the Cabala.  Their
endless task is to reduce chaos to order - but they are insane, and
the order they generate is without meaning.  The workroom is part of
their realm, and they were out of it for a specific reason, of which
more later.

The chant is a derisive reference to an event discussed in Luther's
analysis of the Apocalypse of St John - the Harrowing of Hell on
the day of the Last Judgement - which, evidently, they do not expect
any time soon.  Again, in gnostic teaching it is the day when every
hidden thing shall be revealed; Jesus says so explicitly in the Gospel
of Thomas.

And the message of the dream is clear:  Give up.  You will never
decipher the Voynich manuscript; you may find in it whatever order,
whatever statistical regularities, you please; but that order will
be without meaning.  You can work on the problem until Hell freezes,
and you will get nowhere.

The Evidence

Finally, my evidence for giving credence to this dream.  First, the date.
February 2 is the feast day of Dis Pater, the lord of the underworld.
During the hours before dawn on that day, by long tradition, the Doors
of Hell are opened, to permit Persephone to return to the upper world
in preparation for Spring.

Secondly, a specific detail of the dream.  Why was I naked when looking
for gold in the stream, but got dressed to visit a nymph in her bedroom?
Because, by even older tradition, one must become unclothed to descend,
and clothed to ascend.

Finally, the physical evidence.  I shave with disposable razors, and
usually change to a new one on Sunday mornings.  That morning, I took
a new razor, removed the plastic cover, and put it on the shelf in the
shower.  When I got in the shower, I trod on something.  It was half
a razor: the handle was just where I'd left it; the part carrying the
blades was on the shower floor.  I have never had a razor break like that
before, but I can recognise synchronicity when it bites me in the foot.
The meaning of the razor is obvious: "entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem".  And the meaning of the broken razor must be:
"Do not accept the simplest explanation of this dream.  The entities
you encountered are real."

Concluding Observations

Two deductions, from details of the dream.  First, if those entities
know their Voynich, Mr Guy is wrong about the Beneventan T.  T is one
of the gallows letters; his "ct" and "c't" represent, not necessarily
respectively, kappa and chi, the hard and soft C of mediaeval Latin
and modern Italian.  Of course, this information is not to be trusted.

Secondly, I know the nymph.  She is a personification of the Tablet
of Hermes, that adopts in the underworld the accidents of ice, in
the terrene world, of emerald, and in the empyrean, of lapis lazuli;
and her name, therefore, is Sappheira.

Enough lunacy for one day.  Back tomorrow with tame, mundane wild
speculation.

Robert

Postscript (added in proof)  And now I realise the first entity also
was mocking me with his sifting.  The salt and pepper represent the
consonants and vowels of the Voynich script, and the message is that
we shall never be able to separate them.  For the mixture did not
divide by element - both salt and pepper went back into both shakers.
(Ah, now you know the difference between negative entropy and
information!)