116v

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[...] AFAIK there is no example of a charm anywhere else that uses any of the words from those two lines, except perhaps "te" and "maria": "anchiton" (or "mchiton"), "oladabas", "multos", "ctev", "cere", "portas", "six", "marix", "morix", "vix", or "abta".  Is there?

Just because you don’t understand the terms and, what’s more, refuse to consider possible interpretations, that doesn’t mean the text isn’t a real charm

Sigh. 

YES, THOSE TWO LINES ARE A CHARM, AND THEREFORE I AM NOT ASKING FOR THE WORDS TO MAKE SENSE OR FORM A PROPER SENTENCE.

But people usually did not invent charms out of nothing.  How would the person know whether his all-new charm worked as intended? How would he know that "marix morix vix abta maria" would indeed alleviate one's putrifer, and not summon Brimstone Maria, the sharp-clawed brain-eating girlfriend of Belzebub? 

Charms were usually either copied or learned verbally, and mutated by the usual "telephone game" process.  As a kid I learned from my mom a Venetian charm to be recited during thunderstorms:

  Santa Barbara e San Simon
  che i difende da tuti i ton
  ton e saéte
  Santa Barbara benedete

  Saint Barbara and Saint Simon [Apostle]
  who protects from all thunderclaps
  thunderclaps and lightning bolts
  Saint Barbara bless us

Except that I am not sure about the last line; it may be missing a pronoun or something. And that is how charms evolve...

To make up a new charm from scratch, either one had to be some kind of nutjob who heard "voices" or convinced himself that he was a genius who figured out the formula for sure-fire charms; or one had to be some kind of unscrupulous swindler or prankster who enjoyed fooling credulous folk into repeating ridiculous strings of "magical" words.  Do you think the VMS Author could have been either?

Thus what I am asking is just ANY EXAMPLE OF A MEDIEVAL CHARM THAT USES ANY OF THE WORDS OF THE VMS CHARM.  

Because I claim that whoever wrote that charm did not copy it from somewhere else, or heard it from his priest or from aunt Mathilda: he just "reconstructed" those words from the smudges that remained on the page -- and thus he got a bunch of words that sounded "magical" but were not used in any charm anywhere else.

And it’s not as though we have to substantiate possible meanings – because we’ve already done that here in this thread in many different ways, some more plausible than others

No, you haven't.  

Again: over the last 100 years, even with extreme twisting of letter identification and spelling, and with the help of countless  paleographers  and linguists, people have come up with possible meanings for less than half of the words; and from those words one cannot parse a single short meaningful sentence.  

One would get the same rate of success if one tried to parse that same text as words of Latvian and Turkish, instead of German and Latin.  Of if one tried the same exercise on the output of a monkey banging on a typewriter.  

That historic failure is strong proof against the theory that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. text contains a meaningful message and/or a real charm, which was deliberately written on bank vellum.  

And, by exclusion, that failure is a good item of evidence in favor of the Big Wipe theory.

All the best, --stolfi