Re: VMs: Re: New stars and what could or could not be in the VMs

["Larry Roux" <lroux@xxxxxxx>]

Proof of anything is hard to come by the the VMS.  For instance, my belief is that the Voy was done by someone who had access to a library of other manuscripts.  He or she pulled one off the shelf, stole some ideas/drawings, and encode the text (or hid some other text) within the glyphs.

This would explain the mixtures of dates/ideas the VMS shows.  Can I prove it?  Nope.  Not yet.  Can you disprove it?  Nope.

So we continue at it from different angles (which is a good thing).



******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
*******************************
>>> barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/05/04 18:46 PM >>>
> Rene Rote;
> I think it is worth following up on what I wrote
> before.
> We should not forget that the person who made
> the VMS had an original mind. He managed to
> invent a new script. He managed to make all sorts
> of original (as far as we can tell) drawings.
> Most herbal books consist of drawings being copied
> from earlier similar books. The biological
> drawings have yet to find a parallel.
>
> So, he may well have had a lot of other original
> ideas, and I would have nothing against the
> suggestion that he may have wanted to show
> the birth of a star or a planet or in fact the
> universe somewhere in some of his illustrations.

Barbara Babbles;
While I agree with that possibility, my gut reaction is that the vms is a
single subject book, an individual's reference manual. Medieval medical
practice ties it all together rather neatly.

When it comes to the "stars" however I've doubts. This is because in my
reading on the history of astrology and the history of divination my
understanding is that astronomy, ie observation of the heavens,  was a poor
relation of the superior science astrology, and folk who made observations
of the heavens were somewhat looked down upon by the practitioners of
astrology.

Odd as it may seem to us today, what was actually happening in the sky
wasn't very relevant to astrologers. Astrologers used charts, tables (often
in
circular format) to make their calculations, and had the (to me anyway) very
odd practice of rather than trying to see the sky through cloudy European
skies, of throwing stones representing the planets onto zodiac charts to
determine their position for the reading. This practice is actually the
origin of the phrase "casting a horoscope" - from the casting of the
stones onto a chart.

What was going on the sky wasn't all that relevant to astrologers. The
position of the planets, sun, and moon, relative to the houses of the zodiac
wasn't effected by "transitory phenomena" such as comments, and previously
unobserved stars (nova) where not of much significance either, because they
didn't change the planets or the houses - the only relevant things to
astrologers.

To a medical man who wasn't an astrologer as such but rather someone who
used astrology as a tool within his work, such things as nova and comets
would be of even less relevance

Things like planetary conjunctions were only relevant in as much as which
house of the zodiac they appeared in; as historical events astrologers
didn't
have any motive for making a record of them.

Hence (because I assume the vms to be a medical man's manual) I find it
unlikely that any note of heavenly phenomena would be made in a manual for
everyday use and reference.

But, as Rene says, the vms author(s) was/were unusual, so the kind of
recording that Robert is suggesting isn't impossible: just to my mind
improbable. CSICOP have done studies about finding "stellar" significance in
ancient building plans and monumental alignments and concluded from
experiment that one can match any random arrangement to the time period of
one's choice; which to me introduces another level of doubt.

But to me the most significant date dependent clue in the vms is the use of
T-O maps, they'd ceased to be used by the 1500s (falling out of use from the
late 1400s onwards); so what were they doing in a 16th/17thC document? And
rather than an argument that just "explains away" (ie logical guess work
without evidence) such an anomaly I think I'd need hard evidence that T-O
maps were still in use in those later times before I'd accept that the T-O
maps didn't put an upper limit late 1400s upon the vms: which would exclude
heavenly events in the 15 and 16 hundreds.

Barbara





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