![]() ![]() An example would be the ampersand, &, which is a ligature standing for “et,” the latin word for “and.” Other ligatures surviving into the modern era would include Œ, Æ, and the ẞ symbol used in German for “ss,” as in “Straẞe” or “Groẞe.” Gibbs says that much of the confusion has arisen because of a missing index page, in which the ligatures would have been explained and the plant illustrations identified. ![]() (It’s plagiarism all the way down, so to speak.) And the mysterious ciphered writing? According to Gibbs, they aren’t an alphabet, but “ligatures,” common in handwritten medieval manuscripts, in which a single glyph is shorthand for an entire word. (Note the illustration above, showing a row of bathing ladies each of whom is tethered to a star.) The cures themselves, according to Gibbs, are largely plagiarized from medieval medical texts like Tratula, De Balneis Puteolanis, and Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus, which themselves are largely plagiarized from Galen, Hippocrates, and Soranus, who themselves plagiarized their cures and simples from earlier writers. According to Gibbs, the manuscript offers herbal and magnetic cures (often in the form of baths), along with astrology (medieval cures were often tied to the patient’s horoscope). Now TV writer Nicholas Gibbs has offered his own solution, claiming that the manuscript is a health manual for upper-class women, or perhaps for a single upper-class woman. So varied are the various claims and counter-claims that you might sensibly conclude that the Voynich Manuscript is, as in Call of Cthulhu, a threat to your sanity. Various solutions have been offered over the years, including theories that the manuscript is Roger Bacon’s lab notes that the text is vowelless Ukrainian or a description of a Cathar rite that the whole thing is a forgery meant to impress Emperor Rudolf II and (from a Finnish character who calls himself “a Prophet of God”) that the characters describe “sonic waves and vocal syllables,” and can’t be deciphered without divine assistance. The text is in an unknown script, widely assumed to be a cypher, and the illustrations are of bewildering variety, including detailed botanical drawings, some of plants that do not seem to exist in nature, along with astronomical imagery, and others drawings assumed to be of occult or symbolic nature. Oops! Despite its appearance in an RPG and the works of Lovecraft, Colin Wilson, and others, the Voynich Manuscript is a real thing, an early 15th Century handwritten manuscript, profusely illustrated by several several different unknown artists. My introduction to the Voynich Manuscript came in the Chaosium RPG Call of Cthulhu, in which it was presented as an item that could (1) increase your knowledge of the occult, while (2) blasting your sanity. ![]()
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