Voynich Comparator | Morgan M.722: A c.1425 De Sphaera With Zodiac, Eclipses and a Real Diagram Grammar

The Voynich astronomical pages create a special kind of seduction.

Circles invite cosmology.

Stars invite astronomy.

Zodiac animals invite astrology.

Concentric rings invite planetary spheres.

And once those associations begin, almost every medieval astronomical manuscript starts looking like a possible key.

Morgan Library MS M.722 gives us a better way to use the resemblance.

The manuscript was made in Austria around 1425—inside the Voynich parchment window. It contains a German translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera mundi and a German translation of the astrological introduction of Alchabitius. Its pages contain concentric celestial diagrams, eclipse diagrams, planetary paths and a full-page zodiac image.

Unlike the Voynich, we know what the diagrams are doing.

That makes M.722 a calibration object.

Morgan M.722 is not evidence that the Voynich comes from Austria or from Sacrobosco. It is a dated control for how a real fifteenth-century diagram grammar encodes spheres, planetary motion, eclipses and the zodiac when its intellectual system is known.

Quick Read

Morgan MS M.722 was produced in Austria around 1425.
It is written in German bastarda and contains 48 vellum leaves.
Its first major text is Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera mundi in German translation.
Its second is the Libellus isagogicus of Alchabitius in German translation.
The manuscript contains a full-page zodiac miniature, six smaller illustrations and illuminated initials.
Its diagrams show planetary spheres, the Sun and Moon, eclipses and celestial geometry.
Fol. 18r places a geocentric planetary diagram inside a ring of the twelve zodiac signs.
Fol. 8v and 17r contain eclipse diagrams in which Sun, Earth, Moon and shadow are explicitly labelled.
The manuscript is almost exactly contemporary with the Voynich parchment window.
The Morgan record states that it was purchased from “Voynich” in 1927; that is a modern custody fact, not evidence of medieval relationship to Beinecke MS 408.

Comparator Firewall

Same century + zodiac + concentric diagrams ≠ common workshop. Purchased from Voynich in 1927 ≠ related to the Voynich Manuscript. M.722 is a control, not a provenance bridge.

This firewall is especially important because the collector’s name creates an accidental modern echo.

The Morgan catalogue’s provenance note belongs to the twentieth-century antiquarian market.

It tells us nothing by itself about the fifteenth-century production of Beinecke MS 408.

What a Known Diagram Grammar Looks Like

M.722 gives us something the Voynich does not.

Labels whose meanings are known.

Because the German and Latin astronomical vocabulary is readable, we can map visual form to conceptual function.

A circle can represent a sphere or orbit.

A smaller circle can represent a planetary path.

A band can represent the zodiac.

An alignment of Sun, Earth and Moon can represent an eclipse.

The geometry is not merely decorative.

It is a structured explanatory language.

The Diagram Has Roles, Not Just Shapes

Consider the full-page folio 18r described by the Morgan.

The Earth occupies the centre of a planetary construction.

Sun and Moon are identified.

Circles mark different centres and paths.

The twelve zodiac signs form an outer ring.

Every visual element has a role inside the astronomical model.

This suggests a stronger way to analyse Voynich circular diagrams.

Do not ask first, “What known picture does this resemble?”

Ask:

What objects occupy the centre?
Which rings are containers?
Which rings are paths?
Which rings are label zones?
Which marks repeat with rotational symmetry?
Which labels attach to objects versus sectors?
Which geometry encodes relation rather than ornament?

That is diagram grammar.

Concentricity Is Cheap Evidence

Many medieval cosmological, astronomical, calendrical and astrological diagrams use concentric circles.

Why?

Because the cosmology itself was often hierarchical and spherical.

Earth at the centre.

Elements around it.

Planetary spheres beyond.

Fixed stars and outer heavens beyond those.

Therefore concentricity has low localisation value.

Any Voynich theory that treats “concentric circles” as a rare clue is over-counting a generic medieval diagram device.

The circle is not the clue. The mapping between circles, labels, objects and operations is the clue.

The Zodiac Is a Coordinate System

In M.722, the zodiac is not twelve decorative animals pasted around an astronomical picture.

It provides a celestial reference frame.

The twelve signs partition the ecliptic.

Planetary positions can be described relative to them.

This gives a useful control for the Voynich zodiac pages.

When the Voynich places repeated human figures around a sign, are those figures:

degrees;
days;
stars;
named individuals;
subdivisions;
calendar positions;
or something else?

A known astronomical zodiac encourages us to model the ring as a coordinate architecture before treating every figure as narrative.

The Eclipse Diagrams Show How Much a Few Circles Can Encode

Folios 8v and 17r are particularly useful controls.

The Morgan catalogue describes concentric-circle arrangements involving the Sun, Earth, Moon and shadow.

To an untrained viewer, the picture can look like a decorative set of circles and discs.

Once the labels are read, it becomes a model of eclipse geometry.

This is an important warning for Voynich interpretation.

Complex meaning can be compressed into apparently simple geometry.

But the reverse is also true.

A beautiful circular diagram can look scientific while being decorative or mnemonic.

The difference is whether the internal relations are stable and predictive.

Diagram Meaning Should Survive Redrawing

A useful property of technical diagrams is invariance under style change.

Draw the Sun as a face or a plain circle.

The astronomical role stays the same.

Change colours.

The relation stays.

Use a different hand.

The topology can remain.

This gives the comparator programme a powerful method.

Strip both Voynich and known diagrams down to relational structure.

Ignore colour first.

Ignore artistic quality.

Compare centre, rings, nodes, sectors, connections, direction and label attachment.

If the topology matches before style is considered, the comparison becomes more meaningful.

M.722 Also Shows Translation Without Diagram Collapse

The manuscript contains German translations of works whose intellectual ancestry is Latin and Arabic-mediated.

The language changes.

The diagram system remains intelligible.

This is another control for Voynich.

A technical diagram tradition can cross language boundaries more easily than prose.

Therefore a visual relation need not imply a linguistic relation.

The same astronomy can be explained in German, Latin or another language while retaining recognisable geometry.

That makes image ancestry and text-language ancestry separable again.

The 1425 Date Is Valuable but Dangerous

M.722 sits inside the same broad period as the Voynich parchment.

This is genuinely useful.

It establishes that around 1425 a European manuscript could combine vernacular text, zodiac imagery, celestial diagrams, planetary motion and eclipse schematics in one codex.

But time overlap is not provenance.

Thousands of manuscripts were being produced across Europe.

A chronological match merely removes impossibility.

It does not generate a relationship.

The Modern Voynich Connection Must Be Quarantined

The Morgan catalogue records that M.722 was purchased from Voynich in 1927.

That fact is fascinating because Wilfrid Voynich’s name is inseparable from Beinecke MS 408.

It is also methodologically treacherous.

A modern bookseller or collector handling two medieval manuscripts does not create a medieval relationship between them.

At most, the shared twentieth-century market route may tell us something about what kinds of manuscripts Voynich dealt in.

It cannot be used to infer common fifteenth-century ownership, workshop or provenance.

Modern custody is a separate clock from medieval production.

What M.722 Can Legitimately Teach Voynich Research

Concentric astronomical diagrams are normal medieval technical devices.
The zodiac can function as a coordinate ring rather than a decorative sequence.
Eclipse geometry can be encoded in a small set of circles and labelled bodies.
Diagram topology may survive translation and artistic change.
Visual ancestry and language ancestry can be separate.
A c.1425 manuscript can combine zodiac, astronomical and astrological material in a vernacular host.
Known diagrams let us define a structural grammar before comparing Voynich.
Modern dealer provenance must never be confused with medieval provenance.

What M.722 Does Not Prove

that Voynich derives from Sacrobosco;
that Voynich was made in Austria;
that every Voynich circle is astronomical;
that the Voynich zodiac rings encode planets in the same way;
that German is hidden beneath Voynichese;
that Wilfrid Voynich’s later possession or sale creates a medieval connection;
that chronological overlap is genealogical evidence.

The eduKate Diagram-Grammar Test

Encode each M.722 diagram as a graph: centre, circles, sectors, nodes, labels and connectors.
Record the known semantic role of every component.
Generate style-stripped versions of the diagrams.
Measure which structural features recur across different astronomical functions.
Build comparable graph encodings for Sacrobosco manuscripts from other regions.
Estimate which topologies are generic to the genre.
Only then encode Voynich circular diagrams using the same rules.
Test whether any Voynich topology clusters with known astronomical functions above chance.
Keep zodiac, cosmological and decorative controls separate.
Reject interpretations that require changing the function of the same geometric feature from page to page without evidence.

Student Lens: A Diagram Is a Sentence Made of Geometry

Primary: draw the solar system with circles and labels, then remove the labels and ask which relationships still survive.

Lower Secondary: distinguish shape from role: the same circle can mean Earth, orbit, boundary or category depending on its connections.

Upper Secondary: represent diagrams as graphs and compare topology instead of artistic style.

JC and adult readers: treat technical images as formal representations whose semantic invariants can be tested across translation, copying and redrawings.

Research Sources

Continue the Comparator Route

The Final Idea

Morgan M.722 is almost perfectly designed to mislead a Voynich researcher.

It is from about 1425.

It has zodiac imagery.

It has concentric astronomical diagrams.

And it later passed through “Voynich.”

That sounds like a story.

The better use is harder and more valuable.

Because we know what M.722 means, we can learn how a real diagram system behaves.

Then we can remove the generic features from the Voynich mystery.

The comparator succeeds when it stops us saying “these circles look astronomical” and forces us to ask whether the Voynich circles obey a coherent astronomical diagram grammar.