Quire 13 (Q13) of the Voynich Manuscript is traditionally known as the balneological section because, at first glance, it appears to show baths and bathers. A closer look at these folios, however, reveals that a strictly balneological interpretation is impossible to maintain.
Back in 2016, I started exploring the idea that these images were structured along a popular narrative. This narrative is hard to see at first, for two reasons:
- Each character is replaced by a nude female figure
- The figures are layered, they portray two different narratives at once
Both reasons are likely related. If the exercise is to tell two stories in polyphony, this is easier to do with blank slate (i.e. nude) figures and minimal attire. I suspect there are deeper reasons why they opted for the nude female form, but for now the “poor actors” analogy will suffice: think of each figure as an underfunded actor doing her best to play two parts at once.
Today, we will focus on one layer that connects f80r and f76v. Remember that the folios are currently out of order, and originally they may have been side by side.
The narrative layer in these folios is the story of Philomela, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work which was extremely popular in medieval grammar schools. I already touched upon Philomela connections in 2016, but would now like to improve this analysis and focus on new insights.
The story
I will first briefly summarize the plot of Philomela’s story. The translation I consulted is A.S. Kline’s, and the Latin version can be viewed at Perseus Digital Library.
The protagonists in our story are the sisters Philomela and Procne, princesses of Athens. It all starts when Procne is married off to the Thracian king Tereus. Even though the Thracians were allies of Athens, they were also commonly regarded as bloodthirsty, warlike barbarians – a bit of a meme in Antiquity. Needless to say, Procne started feeling lonely in these foreign lands, and she asked her husband if her sister could come and visit.
Tereus volunteers to travel to Athens himself to pick up Philomela. Once he is with her, however, he is overcome by desire and as soon as they arrive in Thrace, Tereus violates Philomela, his wife’s sister. Philomela proclaims that she will tell everybody about this evil deed, so Tereus rips out her tongue and locks her away. He returns to Procne with lies about how her sister died.
In her prison, Philomela finds a loom and she ‘weaves purple designs on a white background, revealing the crime’. A messenger takes the cloth to Procne, who learns of her sister’s fate and comes to her rescue. Once reunited, the sisters want revenge. Furious, they kill and cook Terus’ son, Itys, serving the flesh to an unknowing Tereus. During the meal, Philomela appears, tossing Itys’ head at Tereus.
Upon learning that he has been eating his own son, the king draws his sword and chases the sisters. All three are then promptly turned into birds. In other versions of the myth, the transformation is done by the gods in order to save the women, but Ovid does not elaborate on this: one moment they are chasing each other, the next they are birds.
Indications of Philomela
Given the scarcity of attributes and interactions on f80r, or any Q13 folio fo that matter, an unusual amount of those can be connected to the Philomela story.
- A young woman with long hair, holding a spindle (for spinning thread), closely followed by a man.
- A figure with a red-patterned white piece of fabric standing before a queen.
- Two nymphs interacting, one holding thongs (used by Tereus when he severed Philomela’s tongue.
Even though there are several common themes between f80r and Ovid’s Philomela, the VM clearly does not literally illustrate the story. So what gives? If we read Philomela’s story in these nymphs, then what can we learn about the way they were constructed? In the following, I will discuss each figure, trying to separate Philomela’s thread from this seemingly simple yet intricate tapestry.
I. Tereus binds Philomela
Similarly to Callisto’s story on f80v and f82r, the dominant direction here is right to left, which is also the direction two thirds of the figures on f80r are facing. In continuous narrative illustrations, the way characters face is a common method to indicate the flow of the story, as in the example from the 6th century Vienna Genesis below. Nobody accustomed to this type of illustrations will think of reading these from left to right.
We enter the story at Metamorphoses Bk VI: 549. Tereus has just violated Philomela, and she has sworn that she will tell the world of his crime:
I, without shame, will tell what you have done. If I get the chance it will be in front of everyone. If I am kept imprisoned in these woods, I will fill the woods with it, and move the stones, that know of my guilt, to pity. The skies will hear of it, and any god that may be there!
The following line is where our VM folio takes off:
The king’s anger was stirred by these words, and his fear also. Goaded by both, he freed the sword from its sheath by his side, and seizing her hair gathered it together, to use as a tie, to tether her arms behind her back.
Pay special attention to the last part: Tereus takes her hair, and uses it to tie her hands behind her back.
To the modern viewer, the figures below may look like a pair of lovers, but to medieval eyes, there would not have been any doubt that the woman is a prisoner. An important detail is that her hands are crossed. In medieval images, it was most common to draw captives with crossed hands.
Some representative examples:
When tied hands are visible in manuscript art, those tend to be in the front – hands tied behind the back are usually obstructed by the body. But look again at the VM example. Since Ovid states that the hands are tied behind her back with her long hair, the VM artist needed to show both “captive” and “behind back”. He pulled this off by some strange perspective, which allows us to recognize the crossed hands (captive) pose, with the figure still facing forward. Note also how the man is driving her forward, just like the Moorish troops do with their prisoners.
In short, this image does it best to capture Ovid’s phrase: “[Tereus], seizing [Philomela’s] hair gathered it together, to use as a tie, to tether her arms behind her back.”
II. Philomela offers her throat
The very next sentence is: Philomela, seeing the sword, and hoping only for death, offered up her throat. This appears to take us to the next figure down:
Philomela, on the right, is kneeling and thrusting forward her throat. Her arms are still behind her back, in an awkward position (the fingers of her right hand appear to bend under her left arm?). The nymph on the left is making a move towards her (even pointing at her throat), but clearly there is no sword. Using a sword is impossible for VM nymphs, since they rarely get attributes to identify them, let alone actual objects to use.
III. Philomela is mutilated
The very next sentence is when Tereus, instead of outright killing Philomela, decides to sever her tongue, rendering her mute and unable to testify against him. This is his reaction to Philomela’s solemn vow that she will tell the world about his crime.
But he severed her tongue with his savage blade, holding it with pincers
The interpretation of the next image is complex, so bear with me. We do have pincers, but they are held by the wrong figure.
We can understand that Tereus (portrayed by the nymph on the left) does not hold pincers, since VM nymph don’t use objects. When a VM figure holds an item, this appears to tell us something about the figure. In other words, they are attributes.
So why does Philomela, the nymph on the right who is still bound and kneeling, get to hold the pincers? To understand this, we must learn about martyrs. What do the items held by the figures below have in common?
Is the woman top left holding tongs a dentist? Is the one top right an architect with a newly finished miniature? Is the king with the arrow an archer? Does the queen with the wheel repair carts for a living? No, of course not, these objects are emblems that allow us to recognize the figures. Typically, these emblems relate to a crucial part of their story, or to the way they were tortured or killed.
They are Saint Agatha, holding the tongs her torturers used to remove her breasts. Saint Barbara, holding the tower where she was imprisoned. Edmund the Martyr, holding one of the arrows that killed him. Catherine of Alexandria holding the breaking wheel upon which she was martyred (actually the wheel shattered, so they had to behead her). There are many more examples, and medieval audiences were used to seeing handheld items as emblems. The intention of art was to bring across an idea, not show a vision of what actually happened.
Nowadays, the word martyr is understood solely in the religious context: someone who died for their faith. But in the Middle Ages, the Latin martyrium, from Greek marturion, “testimony”, still carried the original meaning: a witness, like in court, someone who gives testimony for their faith. The related “confessor of the faith” draws its vocabulary from the same sphere. A martyr (witness) was someone who declared their faith and was killed for it, while a Confessor was someone who declared their faith publicly in times of prosecution, but was not killed for doing so.
In short, martyr means “witness”, as in someone who testifies, someone who speaks up about what they believe to be the truth. Christian martyrs were among the prime figures to be depicted with attributes in the Middle Ages, and these attributes were often tools of torture or execution.
Now back to Philomela. The reason why Tereus removes her tongue is because she has sworn that she will tell the world about his crime. She says that she will testify, be a martyr in the original sense. “I, without shame, will tell what you have done. If I get the chance it will be in front of everyone”. If I am correct that the Q13a images are a mnemonic construct around Ovid’s text, then the image now makes sense. We are reminded that Philomela’s intention to testify is what led to her tongue being removed and, like the Christian saints adorning church walls, she displays the instrument of her torture.
IV. & V.
So far, we started top right and worked our way down the page, which now brings us to the two figures at the bottom.
The bottom figures face each other from across the page, but one of them is not connected to the rest by the usual waterways; she sits isolated at the bottom left, merely pointing her enigmatic attribute towards the one on the right. Let’s start with the latter figure, who more clearly fits into the narrative.
After Tereus mutilates Philomela and leaves her imprisoned, two things happen. He returns to his wife Procne with lies about how her sister died, so Procne enters a period of mourning. Meanwhile, Philomela comes up with a plan to overcome her muteness: she weaves her misadventures into a piece of cloth. This is why the spindle, used for preparing thread, is a good attribute for the defiant Philomela.
The weaving itself is done on a loom, and there are various types in medieval manuscripts. A frequent type is that where the woman is working a narrow strip of parallel threads, as in the example of Arachne below (Royal 20 C V, early 15th century).
Similarly, the nymph bottom right is seen manipulating parallel lines. At her touch, they change texture, taking on the typical up-and-down look of woven fabric.
On the surface, this is the stream of water that connects her to the rest of the story, but it does not take much imagination to see these uninterrupted lines as threads. In fact, at the top of the page, the pretense of water is gone and only a thread remains:
So if we follow Ovid’s story, it seems clear that this figure represents Philomela picking up the thread fate spun for her, and weaving it into fabric. The one opposing her is more problematic. Following the story, this must be where Procne mourns her sister’s supposed death. To some extent, this works: the figure is isolated from the “thread of events” that connects the others. She appears to face Philomela, who is in her prison, weaving this very thread into fabric. But what is she holding?
The dominant impression is that she is holding some kind of fruits. This was reinforced by similar images I found in various versions of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, all representing a woman holding pears. Remarkably, these are also held by the narrow end, in bunches of three.
What sets the VM ‘pears’ apart, is the little protrusions at the end, which are not really pear-like; we would expect such stems on the narrow part, where the pear was connected to the branch. So maybe they copied a pear image, somewhat awkwardly? Or adapted it to represent another fruit?
Linking Ovid’s narrative to the thread spun between our nymphs, this figure most likely represents something from this passage:
He controlled himself sufficiently to return to Procne, who, seeing him returned, asked where her sister was. He, with false mourning, told of a fictitious funeral, and tears gave it credence. Procne tore her glistening clothes, with their gold hems, from her shoulders, and put on black robes, and built an empty tomb, and mistakenly brought offerings, and lamented the fate of a sister, not yet due to be lamented in that way.
The most relevant part is probably where she brings offerings, in Latin: falsisque piacula manibus infert. Literally: “and she mistakenly brings a piaculum to the deceased spirit (manes)”. The fact that this isolated figure points something towards our weaving Philomela across the page seems appropriate: unbeknownst to Procne, this “deceased spirit” is very much alive and trying to contact her.
EDIT 13 December 2020: I need to add something here based on comment to this post by Ruby. It is so clear and works so well that I feel stupid for not having thought of it myself 🙂 The key bit of information is that to a Greek speaker, Philomela’s name would have meant “lover of fruit”. (The “mela” element is still present in our word melon). By linking Philomela to the nightingale, Ovid implicitly seems to support the reading “lover of song”, but “lover of fruit” is the real meaning, as explained in this article. So Procne’s sister is literally called Fruitlover.
Procne now finds herself in a situation where she believes her sister, Fruitlover, has died, and she is devastated. According to Roman custom, she must now bring an offering to Fruitlover’s spirit. Not to the gods, not in general. Directly to Fruitlover’s manes, as Ovid writes. What do you offer to the spirit of someone who is literally called Fruitlover? That’s right, some generic fruits. So perhaps we are not even meant to identify the type of fruit – just recognizing the things as fruits is enough to know which line of the Metamorphoses this drawing is about. “Falsisque piacula manibus (= Philomela’s spirit) infert”. Fittingly, the fruit-bearing figure is extending her gifts to the other side of the page where, unbeknownst to her, Philomela the lover of fruit is trying to reach her by woven message.
VI. Philomela liberation sequence
Now we return to the separate line of figures at the top of the page. Philomela has finished her work and sends it with a female servant to her sister the queen. The woven fabric is described as “purple designs on a white background, revealing the crime”. The Latin word is purpureus, which translates as “purple, dark-red”. Obviously, the VM does not have actual purple, so we are looking for red designs on a white background being presented to a queen.
This series of figures is brilliantly composed, and shows just how much thought went into the composition, even though we are far from understanding much of it. As soon as the servant with the red-on-white design appears before the queen, she now sees the event that set everything in motion, Tereus abducting Philomela. The whole page hinges on the “abduction” pair, with Philomela’s imprisonment thread going down (blue line) and the thread of her liberation going to the left. Quite literally, these are story-lines.
When Procne finds out what her husband did to her sister, she “has no time for tears, but rushes off”. At this time, the festival of Bacchus is going on, and many young women wander the streets at night in a frenzy. So Procne and her companions blend in with them and make their way to Philomela’s prison. She then liberates her sister, disguises her as well as a “wild bacchante” and returns her to safety.
This might be represented by the next nymphs, but the details aren’t entirely clear to me. Are these Procne and her companions pretending to be bacchantes? One of them is a queen, and they do appear to move in a special manner. Additionally, Ovid talks of ivy in their hair, which might be represented by the blue (though why not green?) streaks. Or is the front nymph Philomela? She is hiding something behind her back, which might be her emblematic spindle.
Finally, we get a pair of nymphs, one of them (indicated with the spindle) gesturing wildly. The other nymph does not look particularly cheerful, though it is dangerous to read too much into these tiny figures’ facial expressions. Either way, this pair matches well with the following part of the story, when the sisters have returned home:
“[Philomela] made signs with her hands in place of speech. Procne burned, and could not control her anger”
VII. Procne’s son Itys is killed and prepared for dinner
Once reunited with her sister, Procne desires revenge on her rapist husband: “I am ready for any enormity: but what it should be, I still do not know yet”. The solution presents itself when Itys, the son Procne has with Tereus, comes over to hug his mother. Procne, “with an unchanging expression, struck him with a knife, in the side close to the heart, while he stretched out his hands, knowing his fate at the last, crying out ‘Mother! Mother!’, and reaching out for her neck.” They then chop him up and prepare him in various ways (“part bubble in bronze cauldrons, part hiss on the spit”).
At the top of the page, facing the sister pair and strangely tucked into the text, we find exactly this: a young man with arms outstretched. Behind him on the floor stands a cylindrical object, perhaps one of the cauldrons. He is connected to the other page by a pattern of dotted lines.
The subject shows parallels to the most spectacular miracle of Saint Nicholas. Three boys were murdered and chopped into pieces by an evil butcher, who hid their remains in a tub. St Nick found the boys and restored them to life. This was a popular scene for manuscript illustration, with the three boys typically extending their hands in a similar way.
Since the St Nicholas illustration is found in a wide range of manuscripts, it is possible that the VM artist had this association in mind; after all, the stories overlaps in the rather awful subject of little boys being chopped up and treated as food.
VIII. Philomela emerges
Then Procne “invites the unsuspecting Tereus to the feast”. When Tereus starts to get suspicious about the type of meat he is consuming, Philomela “springs forward, her hair wet with the dew of that frenzied murder, and hurls the bloodstained head of Itys in his father’s face.”
Granted, this nymph is not holding a bloodstained head, but she is holding “something” round by the “hairs”; it has red parts and a “neck”… Why not just draw a head? Probably because it represents something else in the second layer, so they drew something in between.
On a side note – this post is well over its expected word count already anyway – this very scene was often selected to illustrate the story, perhaps because of its dramatic and dynamic potential. Below is Peter Paul Rubens’ version, held at the Museo del Prado.
I don’t quite know where the nymph above this one fits into the story. Her attribute isn’t clear, and the structure above her is confusing. It does have a lot in common with the hair and crown of a nymph of f82r: the “crown” on top, the blue color, the “braids” on the sides.
IX. They are turned into birds
Finally, it is Ovid after all, Tereus draws his sword and as he chases the sisters, the three of them abruptly change into different birds. These are the final sentences of the story:
You might think the Athenian women have taken wing: they have taken wings. One of them, a nightingale, Procne, makes for the woods. The other, a swallow, Philomela, flies to the eaves of the palace, and even now her throat has not lost the stain of that murder, and the soft down bears witness to the blood. Tereus swift in his grief and desire for revenge, is himself changed to a bird, with a feathered crest on its head. An immoderate, elongated, beak juts out, like a long spear. The name of the bird is the hoopoe, and it looks as though it is armed.
These two nymphs remain under the one with the “head”:
If there are any nymphs in the MS attempting to portray birds, these are excellent candidates: they both “spread their wings”. One appears to rise up (from a cloud? water?) about to take flight. The other dives down into another cloudy formation.
Conclusion
These nymphs are not a literal illustration of Philomela’s story. But I hope I have presented sufficient arguments to show that the threads of Ovid’s tale are woven into these folios. A woman identified by a spindle being abducted by a man, a servant presenting a white cloth with red patterns to a queen, a young man in a pleading posture, nymphs in clouds flapping their arms like wings, and much more. The challenge remains to fully discover the intentions of the illustrations, tease out the other layer of meaning, and find out if/how this can help us with the text.
The Voynich Temple 
I enjoyed the way you tied this together, and you have certainly proved this as a possibility. What’s more, I like that you’re interpreting from a literary and mythological point of view. I do think the balneological section was inspired in theme by the Wife of Bath. The “wives of bath”, because he or she loves to pun, and this section is mostly about nature and women, though I see philosophical arguments on certain pages too, also puns on the ” body”: religious bodies, body of knowledge, body of water, etc.
But that row of women on the top of the page seemed a little different, as if representing actual mythological or literary characters. They could well come from Ovid, but I think myself they are characters from Boccacio’s On Famous Women.
Jocasta is one such woman mentioned, from the famous play Oedipus Rex, whose main theme is of course Fate, where we can trace the idea of “prisoner of fate”. Oedipus and his mother Jocasta marry one another and have children through various tricks of Fate to prove there is no free will.
That was my initial interpretation of the man and woman on the right. She has her hands tied behind her back by a spindle, representing fate, so she is literally a ” prisoner of fate”, and behind her comes a slightly smaller male, because he is her son after all, who is missing a foot!
But I like your interpretation too.
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For me, the challenge is right now to find a work like the Mulieribus Claris or something similar which collects some of Ovid’s myths (particularly Philomela and Callisto) and connects them to Christian elements. There are actually quite a few of them, though I have not found many that contain both Philomela and Callisto. I also came across Boccaccio when researching this post (as well as Chaucer, Gower, de Pizan…), since he also wrote a version of Philomela in Latin, though I have not yet looked into this. It’s the wonderfully titled “Genealogia Deorum Gentilium”.
What I like about studying various versions in detail is that I often know enough about the features that are present to be able to rule them out. For example, in 1427 one Gregorio Correr wrote a play about Procne, but he did not include the scene where Philomela reclaims her voice by weaving, instead all agency is shifted to her sister. This version can be disregarded, since the woven fabric is key to the Q13 Philomela interpretation.
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Koen, it’s too sad a story you’re telling us here: a mother cooking her own son, it’s going to cut my sleep. As for the details, I find the couple of characters in the upper right corner, the queen on an elevation, facing “backwards” and the red-white clothing are very plausible elements.
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I know, right? These are not exactly my favorite subjects. But apparently these stories about rape, torture, infanticide and cannibalism were particularly popular throughout the centuries. I’m often surprised by the amount of widespread medieval works that contain some version of Philomela. Maybe they liked the tragedy of the story?
I agree that the “abduction” scene paired with the queen receiving the cloth really forms the core of the interpretation. The other elements do point to Philomela on the one hand (like the pincers, the pleading boy) but on the other hand they show that these story elements were integrated in a very particular way and that Philomela cannot be the only focus of the illustrations.
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I agree with your interpretation of those figures on folio 80 as Philomela’s liberation. However the rest still looks too tentative to me. For example I do not agree that “each character is replaced by a nude female figure”, because clearly Tereus is depicted not nude nor female and, if you are correct, neither Itys is a female figure here. I guess that the illustrator just liked female characters, for some reason.
I think that the solution here cannot be found with just a bottom-up approach, that is looking at the possible interpretation of a figure, while, in the process, ignoring the overall structure of the book or quire.
For example if you are correct here, that is 80r faces 76v and 80v faces 81r, then there are not many possible ways to reorder the quire. If Nick Pelling (and others) are right about folios 78 and 81 being at the centre of the quire, we are left with a handful of solutions. If they are right about folios 84-75 being next to 78-81, we get just two possible solutions*:
76 80 82 84 78 81 75 77 79 83
77 79 83 84 78 81 75 76 80 82
The first one is alluring, because 76r, the text only page, would be the first of the quire. So, in my opinion, the way to go now is to look at the big picture while investigating the little illustrations.
*I made a little script to list all the possible permutations of the folios in a quire, given some constraints, e.g. a fixed position for a folio or a relative position between two folios.
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The big picture remains problematic, I agree. I talk about two layers, but actually that ignores the surface layer, which mostly consists of naked ladies. So why is the surface layer a clothed man in one case? And why are most of them apparently female and nude?
I think the female nude is the “default position”, it does not contain any information because “female nude” is expected. Anything which deviates from that, adds information, and they did this as sparsely as possible in order to keep both “deep layers” viable. If a figure is a king in the Ovid layer, but something else entirely in the other layer, then dressing him up as a king tilts the balance entirely in one direction. But adding minor indications to the female nude gives both layers equal room to breathe.
So why the clothed man? Maybe this figure simply worked very well for both layers here, so there was no need to go with the default? I don’t know. There’s also the fact that this man appears to come from outside the frame, hardly part of all the connected nymphs, so maybe he was just added to make Philomela work, but he was not required for the surface layer, the purpose of which still eludes me.
Clever that you made a script, otherwise it’s impossible to wrap your head around possible permutations. Apart from printing bifolios and playing around with them. Page order remains difficult, even with the connecting narratives. There are some larger themes (like spinning and related activities) which connect various Q13a folios regardless of the narrative.
Regarding the second layer for these folios, I have ditched all my previous attempts. It would help if I had some more ideas here, but I prefer caution. There is now only one figure (or rather, pair) where I have a very clear idea, and I wonder why I hadn’t noticed this before. I will write about this in the next post, together with some art history 🙂
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I agree that the nude female is the default. Men are only shown imo when a very specific one is being indicated. I think that argues more for my Oedipus interpretation because Jocasta appears in his story not hers, but I would not rule out Tereus for that reason.
I’m also reading from both a hermetic and a medieval medical point of view because I suspect the MS is primarily a medical pharmaceutical performance, focused on the female more so than the male, as I think the majority of readers have surmised. And the female is of course symbolically associated with nature, the body.
If medical, the role of fate as dictated by the zodiac and the decans was huge as it pertained to health. Moreover, fate was sometimes beneficent but more often seen as malevolent, so physicians used astrology and magic to try to counter it.
That’s why I think the spindle, the weaving woman you pointed out, and then there’s another one with a spike-like thing that’s possibly a measuring rod, and of course the clippers – are representing fate as in the three fates. Those are their symbols. One spins, one measures/weaves, and the last snips.
It therefore makes sense to me that the queen like figure with the red crown facing those figures is not an amiable figure. She’s in a barrel so she’s likely divine giving out bad fortune/fate. The first with the drapery to me seems like Medea with fleece, the second I don’t know but with her hands behind her back she might be yet another “prisoner of fate”, and the last Jocasta/Oedipus, their story synonymous with ” prisoners of fate”. Or Philomena!
The others lined up ahead of the red crowned figure might be the luckier ones. One of them is carrying a spindle too, but it is not tying her up.
My reading…trying to match content to theme.
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I agree that there is probably an allusion to fate in the spinning symbolism, at least one’s fate as one’s “story”, thread as narrative, weaving as a tale. The Fates regularly crossed my mind, but the spinning/weaving allusions are too spread out to suggest that the Fates are directly referenced. Moreover, the focus really seems to be one spinning and thread, which is after all only one of the fates.
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I don’t think there are necessarily Three Fates anywhere here. Spindles and measuring rods and snippers allude to them but are symbols of Fate in their own right, especially if all three of them appear fairly closely together.
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The nymph holding the fruit can be a pun : φῐλομηλος – fond of apples or fruit for Φῐλομηλη – Procne’s sister ?
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Ha, good idea. I remember reading this, probably on the wiki, that “Philomela” does not mean “lover of song” as it was often taken, but rather “lover of fruit”, μῆλον . What better offering to appease the spirit of the dead than that which she loves 🙂
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Koen, I’m pretty impressed with your exegeses of the imagery of Q13, and can’t wait to read more. My parents were ultra-liberal Christian biblical scholars, who gave me a great appreciation for the Perennial Philosophy and world mythology. Bedtime read-aloud books included the works of Thomas Bullfinch, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. I had it ingrained in me early on that there are not that many truly original stories. There are only new and original ways of presenting the same handful of stories that make up the universal human experience, and resonate with nearly all human beings.
I think about this universality when you talk about “poor actors” and “the [default] nude female form”. By choosing to draw them this way, the VMs’s illustrator could be saying “This [I]can be[/I] Philomela, but doesn’t [I]have to be[/I] Philomela. It can also be countless other stories, from far and wide and throughout the ages, which make a similar point.” The illustrations are stripped (no pun intended) of cultural and temporal baggage, lest such baggage get in the way of readers seeing how relevant and universal a story it is.
The problem is, I’m afraid that at the time of the VMs’s composition, the Perennial Philosophy and the Hero with a Thousand Faces are anachronisms. These ideas clearly evolve from Hermeticism and the Western esoteric and mystical traditions, which were certainly well underway by the XV century. But that doesn’t change the fact that Campbell and Jung came up with their ideas of literary universalism through the lens of modernity, and I have a hard time seeing even the most cosmopolitan and learned medieval authors coming up with such ideas. I could be wrong about this, though; we often don’t give people from bygone eras enough credit when it comes to ingenuity.
So, for example, I have no problem with the idea that Callisto and Stella Maris represent essentially the same story, making similar points symbolically, from different time periods and cultural milieux. But was this intentional or unintentional, on the VMs illustrator’s part?
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Hi David, thanks for your comment! Yes, I think you are right that the nude female was chosen as a default form because dressing the figures would, to reverse your stripping pun, also dress them in cultural markers. If it is understood that the nude figure is just a tool and not a *¨literal* bather, then it gives much more leeway for an exercise of this kind.
About the universal myth, you are probably correct that those particular views postdate the VM. However, there was a universal truth in the 15th century, and that was the Bible. In fact, there are many examples where authors justify their writing about Classical myth by very explicitly linking each story to Biblical truths. The prime example is the Ovide Moralisé, but there are many others.
So far though, I think Q13 is not an attempt to illustrate a moralized Ovid, unless I have not found the correct adaptation yet (not all of them are easy to access). One problem is that some of the most striking parallels rely specifically on Ovid’s text, like Juno pulling Callisto by the hair on her forehead. Translations were not available yet, and adaptations in the vernacular took some liberties with the source text. This almost certainly means that Ovid’s Latin original was combined with other material in some novel way.
I am growing increasingly confident that we must look for the solution in an educational context. By the 15th century, Ovid was an absolute favorite in the classroom, especially in Italy. Just yesterday, Marco Ponzi pointed out convincing parallels to a manuscript of the Sfera https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-2296-post-42299.html#pid42299) which is… an early 15th century Italian school book.
So my current best guess is that this was made as a mnemonic exercise. (Linking various spheres of knowledge is how memory experts today still operate). Combine information from various “courses” in a creative way, and you will remember them better. So I see it as a very specific, intentional, and individual exercise. Usually these images are made in one’s head, not on parchment…
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Hi Koen. I shared your comment about the Bible with my biblical scholar father, and he corroborated what you wrote: in the Middle Ages, the Bible was seen as a refined distillation of the truths of the ages, which absorbed and reconciled past schools of wisdom, rather than merely replacing them. He reminded me that this not only happened in the Classical world, but many places where Christian missionaries set up shop. Father Matteo Ricci, for example, became one of the first Westerners to read classical Chinese fluently, and referenced many Chinese philosophical and spiritual classics in his preaching in China. Iconography that conflates Guanyin and the Virgin Mary has a long history throughout Asia. It would seem that universalism, in an inchoate form, was definitely getting its start by the late middle ages.
That copy of La Sfera that Marco Ponzi found, with all the similar images to the VMs, is very striking at first glance. Most of the parallels are a good deal less impressive, though, without the contexts cropped away. But I agree with you that dissimilarity of context is not enough to rule out the possibility of influence or reference. The question, of course, is why the VMs combines precedented imagery in such an unprecedented combination.
I very much like your idea of hunting for contextual parallels in medieval educational materials. Do many such hand-copied textbooks and didactic materials survive today? I’ve recently been fond of the idea that the VMs is the private notebook of someone — an early alchemist working in secret, if I were to make a guess. To that end, I’ve been on a hunt for scans of medieval notebooks. A surprising number of these do survive, and some of them are written in highly idiosyncratic handwriting that’s barely legible. Unfortunately all of the ones I’ve found so far have been the notebooks of merchants, artists, and occasionally royalty, rather than scholars or students. I post under the username RenegadeHealer over at voynich.ninja; I plan on starting a thread on medieval notebooks there, if and when I have a good collection of examples that the VMs might plausibly fit in amongst.
Here’s a pic I think you’ll appreciate:
I thought of these images when you talked about many-layered, composite, contextually strange images composed for mnemonic purposes. The sheer ridiculousness of these images makes them even more memorable. For example, on the right of this image you’ll see a rhinoceros with a runny nose, holding a bottle of cough syrup in one hand and a Corona beer in the other. This is a mnemonic for remembering that the common cold is caused most commonly by strains of rhinovirus and coronavirus. Good luck forgetting that now.
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Aah, I didn’t know it was you. Maybe it’s good that you go by another name on the forum, it seems like half of our members are called David! 😉
The image you post is indeed similar to what I have in mind for the VM. Such things existed in the form of mnemonic bibles which, I admit, I have not yet studied in sufficient detail. So much to study, so little time.
That said, I think Q13 does something slightly different in that it links various layers of information, but it additionally presents the result as if, at first sight, the figures are bathers.
Now on the other hand, there are only a few folios I feel like I’ve figured out, and I may be speaking entirely prematurely.
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I edited this post to include a bit based on Ruby’s comment about Philomela meaning “lover of fruit”.
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The etymology of Philomela is uncertain; it is normally said to be either..
From Greek Φιλομήλη (Philomele), derived from φίλος (philos) meaning “lover, friend” and μῆλον (melon) meaning “fruit”.
AND/OR
the second element from Greek μέλος (melos) meaning “song”. In Greek myth Philomela was the sister-in-law of Tereus, who raped her and cut out her tongue.
‘Philomel’ is a poetic (or poeticising) elipsis for the nightingale which, again, proverbially suffers as it sings of love. Characters called Philomena often have parallel stories woven around them,
A great many of the early ‘martyr-and-virgin’ figures, enter the calendar in a mass of sudden arrivals, about which little was known except veneration in North Africa c.3rdC AD.
It is thought that quite a number of these long-venerated figures (including Christopher-the-traveller and Philomena) were originally Phoenician saints/martyrs during the period of Roman imperial persecution of the Carthaginians, and brought into the Christian calendar of saints only when Constantine’s son made Christianity the official imperial cult around the 3rd-4thC.
By-the-bye no doubt.
I hope your Christmas is not too bitter in 2020.
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Hi Koen, I revisited this post because I believe I see it reflected elsewhere. The Ariadne with ball of wool on 57v leading us through a maze of symbols is one such thought “thread” . My only criticism of the Philomela interpretation was that it did not seem to fit into the context of the rest of the text. But I think I was wrong. It doesn’t fit into the probable alchemical pharmaceutical narrative; it fits perfectly the narrative of why and possibly how the VMS was created. Moreover, the image of the severed head, and the idea of tapestry as code, including warp and weft, fit exactly the work I’m doing on the symbols.
What are the core ideas of this story?
1) An individual is silenced and hidden by a powerful figure.
I mean, Roger Bacon does come to mind, but he is not the only one forbidden to speak or jailed. Rupescissa had the same thing happen to him. So did other monks and individuals. Silenced and hidden for fear of what secrets (or criticisms, or anti dogma, etc.) they might reveal. (I am hoping, btw, that no actual rape took place of our author, and that this too is a metaphor).
2) The individual creates a work of art that only his or her “sister” can read.
Our author creates the Voynich Manuscript that only a family member or fellow initiate – “brother” or “sister” can read – for fear of reprisal.
3) The tapestry is warped and wefted – a good description of “coded” if something like a Polybius square, for instance, was used. Vertical and horizontal categories. Tapestries used a “tent” stitch, which would have looked exactly like our “iii”‘s. They were slanted lines of stitch. Left bottom to right top, but tapestries were always stitched from behind, so mirror- imaged. It might be worth investigating this. I think I might take a text page and just highlight i-sequences to see if it forms a picture, though colour coding would play a major part too. Luckily, my code plan does include the elements, and they have associated colours. So who knows? Just a random thought.
Don’t know if you caught this on Ninja but I’m working on the idea that the gallows are categories – Theological/Elemental, Astrological, Botanical and Biological (Alchemical too but I haven’t got there if so). This means that a symbol such as “o” can be used as a symbol entire, or letter/syllable, that shifts according to its category. Zodiac man is my example for this with the astrology signs standing in for body parts, which in turn stand in for soul/elements, but also of plants.
So “o” could be:
De/us (or Al/ah? in Astrology section if using the Arabic naming system?).
Ar/ies (fire sign – red)
Cap/ut (head)
Flor/a (the flower as “head” on a plant
It’s more complicated than this; endings are detached in the system unless the whole symbol is used. But wanted to point out that your identification of Itys’s head fits perfectly in my mind.
Turn that symbol upside down and it’s a flower.
She’s holding a severed red “flower” by the neck.
And “flower”, unless classified, is synonymous with “head”.
Not joking, but the author probably was.
Could talk about Philomela forever, but wanted to let you know I think you are right, you have once again inspired me and helped me fit one more piece of my personal script puzzle into place.
Cheers to you!
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I disegni di questa sezione sono una rappresentazione illustrata e fantasiosa delle fisiologia degli apparati umani, poco sapevano di come realmente funzionava il corpo umano, immaginavano. I personaggi rappresentano le unità funzionali che fanno funzionare l’organismo, ognuno con il proprio ruolo. Gli stessi li ritroviamo nella sezione astrologica, perché all’epoca si pensava che le stelle, la luna, le costellazioni, i segni zodiacali e le stagioni influenzavano fortemente lo stato di salute.
Il msnoscritto di Voynich è un compendio di medicina medievale.
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Maria – people have said these things for a long time. No-one has yet presented a careful, properly documented study that includes proof.
The ‘bodily organs’ idea, in particular, has been around since the 1920s but so far there has been absolutely nothing similar found in any medieval text, and the bottom line is – if you’re arguing for a western Christian origin – that you’d need to provide a serious argument able to stand up when read by genuine specialists in the history of medieval art from Europe and from elsewhere. I hope Koen won’t mind my saying this – after all you were addressing him, not his readers.
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