The Voynich centerfold. Just about any plant biologist who looked at this illustration cold without any provenance background would tell you it was an early microscopic depiction of plant stems and their cellular structures. Duh.

Over the last 18 months during the course of this project, I’ve concurrently honed my skills on the use of AI, starting with ChatGPT and then Google’s Gemini.

When AI emerged as a user tool, I subscribed immediately. This mirrors my adoption of personal computers for business in about 1983, at a time when the idea people might someday use them for daily tasks seemed, quite frankly, incredible. I immediately blew the minds of Macy’s executives twice my age with what could literally be done overnight, instead of taking two weeks.

In my world, tools are tools; and I’ve spent the last two years learning how to query and direct AI as daily discipline. You can’t just fiddle about with AI; you need to learn how to use it. It’s a skill. The mind which isn’t well organized, tightly focused, wary of error, and hierarchical and critical in nature makes a weak AI user.

Last month I turned my increasingly sharpened query skills into a set of general and specific questions about the trajectory of the argument that the manuscript is actually a sophisticated scientific journal designed with a distinctly (and familiar) medieval mindset in mind. The theory is that the writers had a quite decent microscope at hand.

Using Gemini AI, I asked, is such an interpretation justifiable?

Could the things we see in the manuscript—both the nature of the illustrations, the exact details, and the order in which they are presented— be considered a legitimate and in fact even compelling result of a such a combination of events? Keeping in mind that the order in which the illustrations are presented is an important part of this query. The idea was to review plausible connections between the illustrations and well-know principles of plant biology, both as regard to form and function.

The short answer is—yes.

I’ve attached the detailed abstract on this matter for those who want to do a deep dive into this question.

Read more

We’re continuing to presume, from the perspective of a thought experiment, that the Voynich biota is from a parallel earth, one only marginally separated from our own timeline. The taxonomy of the plant collection—its internal consistency of appearance and the visible relationships between the many illustrated plants—has been shown to be not just plausible from the point of view of what we know of evolution in modern terms. Upon analysis. artificial intelligence (we’re using Google’s Gemini) deems it highly likely that the illustrations represent a real collection of botanical plants based on the taxa as illustrated.

The traits upon which both I myself and AI draw this conclusion are morphological; that is, it’s based on their forms. This is a strictly linear process: plants are commonly (but not always) divided into taxa (groups of species) according to form.

The first taxonomies of plants species, the first of which was by the pioneering scientist Carl Linnaeus, usually used like appearance to classify plant species. Because of convergence in evolution, this can sometimes be tricky; because nature very consistently produces the same exterior and interior forms to solve similar problems, unrelated species may take on nearly identical forms. This isn’t just true of macroscopic (whole-body, outward) appearances; even molecules are subject to the laws of convergent evolution, and it is not at all uncommon for entirely unrelated species to produce the same unique or exotic molecules in order to provide creatures with, for example, venoms or other essential tools.

Read more

I just want you to look at how beautifully and extraordinarily weird this plant is before we continue! And take a look at the rhizomes. The reverse-toothed structures indicate the plant roots would be extraordinarily hard to pull out of the soil. In addition, the intersection between the stem and the root appears to be compartmentalized rather than continuous—a featured shared in multiple forms by many different Voynich plants, which we don’t see in too many of our own plants.

…It ain’t from earth, right? ..And no, that’s not an April fool.

Before we continue with analysis of the imagery of the manuscript. I’d like to say a few things about AI.

Leaving aside the obvious (and endlessly discussed) arguments about its impact on human imagination and creativity, AI can be an excellent tool for performing both broad-based and very detailed analysis. That is in fact what it’s for; some of the initial impetus for developing AI came from the medical community, who look at things like the biological function of gateway molecules in nuclear pores and realized the mathematics and probabilities of possible combinations and actions was well beyond the range of human intelligence and its ability to understand correlative material.

In short, it’s a great tool for evaluating certain aspects of the manuscript and drawing inferences from it that would not necessarily be apparent to human intelligence.

I’ve done just that with a series of targeted questions about its taxonomic features; and you’ll eventually be getting an abstract of that group of manuscripts, along with summaries.

For the time being, let’s just focus on the plant illustrations, which we haven’t looked at yet. So far we’ve been obsessively focused on the mysterious “bather” pages;” and you’ll see AI has a number of salient opinions about that which tend to be in very strong agreement with some of my core hypotheses. In short—and here’s a spoiler—the manuscript is more probably more of a scientific laboratory journal than anything else.

That explanation addresses certain not-so-obvious peculiarities of the illustrations; and AI will help us examine the reasons for that. Remember, we can’t assign meaning to the text because of its opacity; but collectively, the illustrations—along with the lack of page numbers— lend solid support to the lab notebook theory.

But the bather pages are hardly the bulk of the book. The majority of the book’s artworks consist of its many plant illustrations; and we already know that they do not represent any known earth biota. At least not this earth; and I say that because they do indeed represent the biota of an earth… nearly identical to ours, but with certain peculiar differences.

If that bothers you, read further.

Read more

OK, so now we come to a vulgarized summary of this particular page, keeping all the previous propositions about microscopes, molecules, and atomic theory in mind.

In order to dumb the whole thing down so that we can see the big picture a little less fuzzily, let’s just take an overall conceptual look at the three different sections of this page.

In the first section, we see a fairly detailed illustration of an internal organ or organelle, fed by vessels, with nutrition entering from “above.” This indicates that the nutrition is from a higher level, that is, food containing spiritual qualities as well as material ones. It’s entering an intelligence space, a place where Agency is exercised, that is filled with vitality. This blue + green formula indicates an inflow into the vital and living place of the cell, organ, or personal being receiving the material. All are equally valid points of view from the point of view of the authors, once again, because of the likely hermetic nature of the activity.

Read more

The Ladies at Work

So we’ve reviewed the contents of bathers page 18 with an eye to the possibility it reveals the presence of microscopes in active use by the writers of the book; and that would indeed explain many otherwise weird features of the manuscript’s illustrations. Any pioneering text exploring the technical world of plant tissues using microscopy would have been struggling to understand the staggering microstructures, orderly arrangement and extraordinary complexity of plant tissue.

Of course they created profuse illustrations; and they applied the old “as above, so below” hermetic adage to explain what they saw—so effective is that simple interpretive mechanism that we still use it today.

We know that at the time of Albertus Magnus (some several centuries before the 15^th century date of the Voynich manuscript) the exploration of the state and nature of consciousness in plants was already an active question among the scientifically minded. High Medieval thinking (1100-1300 a.d.) is well known to have lagged well behind such thinking in, for example, Arabic culture; so we can presume (as we indeed must) that concern over the nature of consciousness of plants must go back some thousands of years earlier. Plants and agriculture are, after all, the essential backbone to the initial development of civilization; and early peoples studied the habits of plants quite intensely in order to understand them, since their lives literally depended on it. So the way in which the manuscript ascribes the internal process of plants to female agents, while ingenious, strikes me as being in a certain way entirely logical.

Read more

Bathers page 18 pretty clearly seems to represent a further ”digestion” series. These ladies are not just taking a bath!

Their arrangement in definite groups is meant to indicate organization and inner workings; and because of the enumerations I’ve chosen to interpret this in terms of Gurdjieff’s law of octaves. This thing with octaves did not just belong to Gurdjieff, you know; it was an ancient idea, of course, and many brother-and-sisterhoods, initiatory societies and students of inner work have been aware for many centuries of the close inner ties between the musical progression of octaves, the evolution of energies through vibration, and inner spiritual work. So we can reasonably presume this idea may have influenced these drawings long before Gurdjieff came along.

Of course we can’t be sure of that; and we can be even less sure that Gurdjieff’s specific version applies here.

Oops. We’re gonna do that anyway. But you knew that.

Read more

Don’t forget to check out today’s new video on The Morning Five.

Read more

We’ll discuss this fascinating page in more detail in the next few posts.

But for now, enjoy the Gurdjieff interpretation!

Read more

In keeping with my latest practice of taking notes on the pages and then expanding on them, let’s take a look at page 17 of the Bather figures.

Subscribe now

Read more

I should charge extra for this explanation, you know, because this page is literally priceless. Ha ha ha.

The diagram is as Yogic as any chakra diagram; but we’ve seen those. Yawn. This is perhaps more interesting, because it’s unusual and “new.” There’s literally too much to absorb here… pun intended.

So the diagram is worthy of further inspection and …

Read more

After a long hiatus, I’m taking some simpler approaches, which will help move the project forward without as much description; although there will be plenty of writing moving forward.

In this case, since we are after all working on a description of potential meaning in visual images, I’ve simply taken notes on page 15 after extracting the text from the m…

Read more

Putting it all together, perhaps we can better see how, in this page, overarching cosmological waters of life (the top section, with the active and passive waters of life, joined together by a reconciling divinity) join together so that a first solar and then planetary process can take place.

Those who may wonder what cosmological waters of life can find…

Read more

My apologies!

I've been amazingly busy with many other projects over the past six months. I need to revise the last post as there were grave errors in it; and I'll try to get some new posts up over the weekend.

Some of you will know I'm currently in the midst of an effort to convert a lot of my efforts to video format (camera equipment is complicated and…

Read more

CAT:

The new book by my daughter Rebecca.

Like the animals, it’s smart, unusual and perceptive… but not always warm and fuzzy. It raises questions about who we are, and who our pets really are.

Many cats I have known (and now know) are in it in supporting roles.

Recommended reading.

Warmly,

Lee

Read more

Ah! And now we come to the craziness of the bottom of the page. It looks like chaos! And we note something that perhaps should have been obvious all along – although the illustrations are, for explanatory purposes, highly competent, they’re not the product of professional illuminated manuscript makers, where refinement and elegance matter a lot. These are actually lab notes. And that’s significant because it once again explains something about the manuscript which only becomes obvious after a fair amount of time and thought. After one realizes it, one just says “duh.”

What we have is a vesicle—either an organ, an organelle, or – as I believe to be the case – a cell filled with green vitality. Whatever it is, it’s about plants, because that’s the ultimate subject of the whole book. Whenever we can’t figure out what the heck is going on, we start there, remembering that plants and souls are not separate things, but very much linked, and alike. For now, we’ll just call it the cell.

It is a very living environment, filled with the powerful green energy of what we today call chlorophyll; and there are intelligent elements – represented as queens – circulating in it, entering it, incorporating with it. There are also energy flows as depicted by the squiggly lines. They flow both into, and perhaps more interestingly, inside the cell.

Subscribe now

Read more

You’ll recall our friend the woman who tramples the grapes of the waters of life from the last post. She has her hand inserted into this otherworldly device! Brave move on her part, I think; it’s obviously an alien thing.

Or is it?

In fact it’s a cross, turned on its side; and no wonder it’s lying down. It’s tired out because it carries a set of very complex symbolic messages! Let’s right it for a moment to see what’s going on here:

Subscribe now

Read more

Thanks for following the journey!

Here we come to one of the most delightfully, complicated pages so far; and it will test all our skills of interpretation and everything we’ve learned so far to see what's going on here. It relates to the next page, as well, so…

Read more

Illustration: a page from from Boethius’ De Institutione Musica

The next bather page—the thirteenth in the series as I count them— brings us a deceptively simple image: two groups of women collected in one “cell,” one community—a small, minimalist, and oddly walled castle, as it were.

This image is a continuation of the community of work we see undertaken in the previous page. Taking them together, they begin to make more sense; they appear to depict the interior of cells.

Subscribe now

Read more

This morning, I was reading Meister Eckhart's sermon 81, which, as anyone familiar with the dating of his works knows, pre-dates the Voynich manuscript by something like 200 years or so.

In it, he says of Grace, Love, and Faith, “Therefore these are called divine virtues, because they perform God's work in the soul, just as we can see by the power of th…

Read more

In the last post, I promised to go into this set of three pages in more detail so that one can better see how, taken together, they produce a comprehensive narrative about inner work. The matter can't be properly understood without putting all three together. Because this is detailed, and may be hard to read on the web, I'm including a PDF of it at the end of the post.

As I’ve explained at length in other places about other visual works, it's nearly impossible to understand the more esoteric aspects of medieval and late medieval art without understanding the esoteric practices that lay behind them. Because very few people who study art history have any deep grounding in esoteric matters, when one reads western art’s history of its own, the esoteric element – which is blatantly present in painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and all over the cloisters and capitals of gothic cathedrals –is either misunderstood or completely overlooked.

What we learn from this diagram is not just that it’s a fairly standard map of esoteric initiatory practice. We also learn, as ought already be obvious, that during the 13th and 14th centuries esoteric practice in medieval Europe had advanced enough for monastics and other adepts to achieve remarkable, even what would be called high yogic, levels of inner unity.

Read more