kaos

sunflowers didn’t have an ounce of chemistry sense between them, otherwise it would
have been obvious to them that the pigment chosen by Van Gogh was originally
sunflower yellow but went that strange colour it is today as a result of a reaction caused
by atmospheric pollution. Examining my theory of the Voynich ink changing colour
the next day, however, I recalled how one should really tie oneself to the mast to protect
oneself from the manuscript’s Siren call drawing scholars onto the rocks.
At one time I felt the key to solving the mystery of the Voynich ms. lay in its
astronomical diagrams. Not in the other-worldly plants illustrated alongside the
(supposedly) encrypted text. For these weird botanical specimens resist identification
with a peculiar tenacity, while yet resembling specific plants in the more fluid spaces of
memory and dream. When I first began to look at the manuscript I noticed a plant I
recognised but couldn’t remember its name. That night I awoke from a dream shouting
aloud: “It’s a white campion!” It seemed like a revelation, yet it was only remembering
a flower, but ever since then I have been fascinated by the manuscript’s power to excite
wonder and offer small breakthroughs while forever withholding almost everything. I
think I would go mad with frustration had I not learnt to tear myself away from it after
too much sustained interest. I eventually gave up on the flowers and turned to the star
charts. On one of the folios is a diagram showing what seems like an unmistakable
depiction of the juxtaposition of the bright star Aldebaran with the Pleiades, which
was pointed out suggestively by Bradley E Schaefer in Sky and Telescope magazine in its
November 2000 issue, not the first time the magazine has taken an interest in the
manuscript’s astronomy section. As if to form a fortuitous Rosetta stone, the stars are
labelled in the same strange script as the rest of the ms. By gathering all the names of
Aldebaran and the Pleiades in all plausible languages this labelled star configuration
could be used as a key to open up the door to the Voynich cipher, to this day unbroken.
That’s assuming the text is enciphered, for even that most basic assumption is to my
mind a likely fallacy.
Whenever one is foolhardy enough to allow the fascination with the Voynich ms. to
grow—before wresting oneself away once more (some never do)—the questions keep
piling up: what are these curious plants, where do they grow? Are they real plants
strangely drawn, or imaginary plants? Why are star charts in what could be a book of
botany, or even plant consciousness, according to one theory. Why the cartoons of rotund
women in bath barrels, and girls going down waterslides (folio 75 r ), with each nipple
delicately dotted? Early balneological treatises—scientific studies of bathing and mineral
springs—do exist, but in the Voynich ms. the cartoons seem just a little Larsen’s Far
Side and the esoteric plumbing systems like something from Dr Seuss. And while it
was common to draw a heroic human face on the sun in medieval manuscripts, the
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