High resolution voynich manuscript1/27/2024 ![]() ![]() The Picatrix would, a few centuries later, prove influential for the utopian political vision sketched by Tommaso Campanella in his Civitas Solis ( City of the Sun ) of 1623. We may also note that in Alphonso X’s late-thirteenth-century translation from Arabic into Spanish of the so called Picatrix or more properly the غاية الحكيم ( The Goal of the Wise ), an important twelfth-century Arabic grimoire and a key text of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Castilian author lists a “Cocalo” as one in a long line of kings of the fictional city of Adocentyn (no such list exists in the original Arabic, and some have argued that it is an intentionally deceitful addition found only in later fair copies of the Spanish). In context this is almost certainly a moniker rather than a proper name, whether one invented by the author or adopted by “Cocalus” himself. J.E.H.S.Ĭocalus is the name of a mythological Sicilian king who, among other feats, arranged for the killing of Minos, the father of the Minotaur. She does however wish to let readers know that, this week only, funds raised by new subscriptions to this very Substack newsletter will go toward helping her to buy a new horse scale for her veterinary practice, and that if her efforts here prove sufficiently useful in covering the expenses accrued in her principal line of work, she will send us further installments of her translation in the future. I will not be able to answer any questions you might have about the text, beyond the information she has provided, nor will Justine-Hélène be willing to answer them, if I’ve understood her uncharacteristically cryptic e-mails to me in this matter. It is recommended you read the translations (that is, my translation of her translation) first, and only then to move on to her footnotes (which I have also translated) and to read them consecutively. What follows is my faithful translation from the French of the materials Justine-Hélène has sent me, together with images of the first three manuscript pages themselves. But I am confident, based on long and significant exposure to the workings of her exceptional mind, that whatever Justine-Hélène says about the mysterious manuscript is not to be ignored. I cannot of course vouch for the accuracy of what she has come up with, and so far she is only willing to share the first three pages of her translation, nor will she reveal any of the methodological considerations by which she arrived at her interpretation. I myself have written a bit about the manuscript (see for example, this recent piece of mine in the Wall Street Journal ), but I remain a mere amateur, unlike my longtime friend and intimate sharer of Voynich insights Justine-Hélène Le Goff, a holistic large-animal veterinarian serving the farming communities in the region of Quimper (Brittany). Evidence from carbon-14 dating and chemical analysis have in more recent years shown that the work is indeed as old as Voynich claimed, but beyond this not much more has been resolved… that is, perhaps, until now. It is not surprising therefore that many scholars have taken the manuscript for a fraud, perhaps perpetrated by Voynich himself, who for his part long insisted it was an encrypted treatise of the medieval Oxford alchemist Roger Bacon. As if this were not mysterious enough, until now none of the dozens of botanical illustrations in the work have been successfully identified with any known species of plant. ![]() The Voynich Manuscript has long been held to have been written either in an unknown natural language or in an uncrackable cipher. This latter’s eponymous treasure is currently held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Yale University Library (MS 408), which has, to the great benefit of researchers, digitized the work and made high-resolution scans available online. It remained in Jesuit collections until 1912, when it was purchased by the London-based Polish antique bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930). ![]() The manuscript is first known to have been in the possession of the Czech collector and alchemist Jiří Bareš (1585-1662), from whom it passed in 1665, via the physician Jan Marek Marci (1595-1668), to the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) in Rome. The so-called Voynich Manuscript is -or is believed to be- a work treating of botanical, pharmaceutical, astrological, and balneological matters, written on calf vellum in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century.
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