Re: VMs: Goat vs. sheep

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  > [William:] I looked at Kelley's material on Enochian in the British Library.  It 
  > is not obvious to me he used a grill.  He created enormous numbers of 
  > enormous (49x49) grids of letters (seemingly at random).  He appeared 
  > to be using these to create texts.

Those 49x49 grids were not random! 

Well, not if they are like the couple of examples found in Dee's
books. "Our" Jim Reeds cracked the latter a few years ago; you will
find the URL of his paper in the archives. (They are quite
interesting, though, as early examples of cellular automata!)

If Kelley's tables are built the same way, it seems unlikely that they
were meant to generate pseudo-meaningful text; and even less likely
that they were used for the VMS.

Ditto for the "magic squares" with angel names which he foisted on
Dee: I can't see them as more than attempts to produce fake mystic
diagrams --- like that sevenfold Sigillum Whatever which is often
featured in Dee-related publications.

  > [Pam:]   A lack of exposure to sheep and goats simply
  > does not match the facts of European culture. 
  
I am still wondering whether that is true of sheep. They certainly
were common in most European *countries*, but what about *regions*
(plains vs. hills, etc.)?

As a kid in the periphery of São Paulo I had neighbors who raised
goats, pigs, cows, chickens -- but not sheep. There are plenty of
cattle farms in this region, and quite a few horse farms, some right
next to Unicamp; but not one sheep farm. In fact I can't recall seeing
a sheep up close here in Brazil, or in all the years I lived in
California, except in zoos. Yet sheep are a major cattle in
neighboring Argentina, and lamb meat is easily found in supermarkets,
etc.

So I would conjecture that sheep, unlike goats, are generally confined
to regions where the environment is more appropriate for them than for
other kinds of cattle. Perhaps hilly/rocky land, where there is plenty
of grass but where you cant plant wheat or raise cattle?

Am I all wrong on this, too?

  > We know this guy was at least exposed to vellum, which is
  > sheepskin . . . right?

I have always "known" that the VMS material is prepared calf skin,
not sheep skin.  (Should't the latter be called "parchement" rather
than "vellum"?). I can't recall the source, though.

Anyway, vellum was an industrialized and widely traded product, so
its users were generally very far from the source animals (and especially
from the abattoirs and tanneries).

  > this is the best picture of a goat I could find.
  
Thanks!! And for the leg drawing info, too!

  > So how does this hypothesis run? This person who spoke a language
  > which no one understood was brought to Europe where he saw
  > European hairstyles, then locked up in a room without windows so
  > he could not see sheep and given vellum and ink. . . ?

Um, Kircher at Rome had a Chinese secretary at some point. Granted,
that was already in mid-1600's. Before that, there was a comitive of
three Japanese noblemen who visited Rome by way of Portugal, in the
late 1500's I think. Two mongol (?) princes visited the king of
France, a couple of centuries before that. Undoubtedly there were many
other such visitors that just didn't made it to the history books...

Note that he *may* have known sheep, but perhaps he didn't know that
"Aries" meant not just "yang2" but specifically "shan1yang2" (or
whatever).

Suppose you asked a random European to draw "an Arab and his camel".
How many humps would you get? I suspect that the average would be well
above 1.5...

  > Or many European ladies with their various hairstyles descended
  > upon a Mexican tribe and attempted to explain Western astrology to
  > a man they presented with Western-style writing tools, and asked
  > him to write them a book?
  
Er.. AFAIK, the first European women in Brazil were brought by Admiral
Villegaignon, a French adventurer who landed in Rio de Janeiro in 1555
and founded a colony of French Huguenots (La France Antarctique) ---
destroyed by the Portuguese in 1560-1567. Legend has it that those
ladies were, um, entertainers of a sort, so presumably well furnished
with wigs, hats, and dresses -- and the occasional absence thereof 8-).
Maybe...

All the best,

--stolfi


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