created, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Yours Truly… by Marc Drogin Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses by Marc Drogin
Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body
Why I’m reading
Continuing on the Marc Drogin literary, literary journey. These books are light enough, and quite inspiring in their research.
The Mythical Origins, Magic Powers, and Perishability of the Written Word
Sounds a far-fetched subtext, but also – yes please!
The best sign of originality lies in taking up a subject and then developing it so fully as to make every one confess that he would hardly have found so much in it. Goethe
Napoleon demanded his librarian Barbier, ship 20 novels a day to wherever he might be.
Books are incredibly fragile. Biblioclasm is book, destruction.
If books were too heavy to be held conveniently they’d be torn in half.
The founder of neurology Hughlings Jackson, ripped out the pages he liked and sent dislocated chapters to friends.
In the Beginning Was The Alphabet
Whence did the wond’rous mystics art arise Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How both to colour, and embody THOUGHT? Thomas Astle 1780
Evolution was pictographic hieroglyph, to ideographic representations to abstract phonetic symbols.
Sumerian god En-ki, lord of the earth, lived in the sea and was man-like in features, but fish-like from the neck down. He is responsible for the gift of knowledge and crafts, and thus the alphabet and writing.
Also, Nisaba, who they believe had taught them how to write.
Nisaba
Curious to find more about this goddess. I find:
Nabu gradually replaced Nisaba as a deity of writing in what has been described by Julia M. Asher-Greve as “the most prominent case of a power transferred to a god from a goddess” in Mesopotamian history
Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing. He wrote The Book of the Dead where he is quoted:
I am Thoth the perfect scribe, whose hands are pure, who opposes every evil deed, who writes down justice and hates every wrong, he who is the writing reed of an inviolate god, the lord of laws, whose words are written and whose words have dominion over the two earths.
Thoth had the face of a dog, in a baboon-like body. As such with their simian appearance, and ability to hold pen, it was commonly believed apes could write and were available for “stand-ins” for gods at temples.
According to Arabian Mythology, God became so irritated at Apes transgressions during their idle hours that he took away their writing ability.
Memory and recitation were the only means of preservation of information.
The Pharaoh spoke to Thoth:
Thou, father of letters, hast allowed thyself to be blinded by thine inclincation, till thou seest things different to what they are. Those who learn by letters shall leave those strange characters that care of recording all that they should have confided in memory, and they will themselves preserve no actual recollection of the things themselves. Thus thou hast discovered, not a means of memory but the means of reminisce. Thou givest to your disciples the means of appearing wise without really being so, for they will merely read, and not have the living instruction of masters.
The Chinese got their alphabet: one day, circa 3500BC, Fu-hi went for a stroll near his palace. He came upon a toad, delighted by the patterns of his skin he carried it back to his chambers. He admired the marks, and guided by one of the Chinese gods devised a system of writing based on the back patterns.
Note
Looking into this further,
Cangjie is thought to have once been an historian to Huangdi. As the court historian and record keeper, he was asked by the Yellow Emperor to devise a method for recording important information. Legend has it that Cangjie journeyed into the wilderness to clear his mind before embarking on his monumental task. During his sojourn into nature, he saw natural patterns in objects like trees, animals, stars, planets, and buildings. He translated the patterns he saw into logograms which would become the writing system used all across the Chinese speaking world.
Another version of the story states that Cangjie was inspired after observing the lines on a tortoise’s shell. After he invented the writing system, grain such as millet rained down from heaven and demons and ghosts wailed at night.
Bind your wobbly hands with the reins of Karmentis - a popular practice phrase amongst 9th century students
Spells and Spelling
rel: Spelling Spells
The letters were considered holy, since the gods invented the alphabet.
The Pyramid of Princess Neferuptah
Egyptian “letters” contained shapes of eagle, chick, owl, crane, dog, snail, frog, fish, snake and so on. Archaeologists who came upon this writing (describing the importance of the deceased) found the creatures mutilated. The Egyptians feared that when the people had left the pyramid, and the doors were sealed, the letters would come to life; the fish swimming, the birds flying and the text would be lost. The creatures must be crippled for the text to remain intact.
Egyptians called hieroglyphs mdw-ntr – “speech of the gods”. The words were not symbolic of him, they were him.
quote Removal of a pharaoh’s name from his monument was a terrifying act of violence – because if the name was remove, the pharaoh ceased to have ever existed.
Roman Physician Quintus Severus Sammonicus recommended curing ague by writing “abracadabra” repeatedly on a piece of parchment and applying it to the patient.
Thought
I mistakenly though ague was a type of malaise or lethargy, like an early kind of depression. But it seems it comes from malaria, or a sharp fever.
I point this out because my initial misread here was that the patient must write abracadabra, because they are “feeling off” – almost like a meditative practice or mantra. “Distract yourself with tedium”
The cure for a fever or tooth ache was to wear the word written on parchment
Welsh Rat Curse
Thought
These all resemble permutation poems and in a way labyrinth. I wonder what the fascination with this method is?
The cure to Welsh rat calamity was to write out
r.a.t.s.
a.r.s.t.
t.s.r.a.
s.t.a.r.
and jam message in the jaws of the head rat.
Forbidden Alignments
In the semitic and greek alphabet systems letters were used to represent numbers. In the roman alphabet although numbers were not identical to letter shapes, they were so similar that they were soon interchangeable.
In Graeco-Roman times the Jews, who had adapted the Greek system had occasional problems with it. The number 15, should have been formed by using the two letters representing 10 + 5 yh. [[Bug on Sensor|But yh are the initial letters of yhwh or Yahweh, the name of God]]. To avoid this sacrilege they wrote it as 9+6 (or tw).
For the Romans, early use of numerals involved only an additive principle: 4 was written IIII not IV. In the Middle Ages a subtractive approach was used, for example CM for 900, or 100 less than 1K. A theory for the delay in adopting subtractive practice was shying at writing IVPITER, the most powerful Roman God.
Despite Christianity dropping Jupiter, the Irish also had difficulty with adoption – as they avoided use of X due to the relationship with Christ, identical to X (chi) which Christ’s name begins in Greek.
Miracles By The Book
Legend - A saint Maedoc is outside reading. He sets down the book, which is left in the rain.
There came a storm and a heavy downpour just then, and Bishop David saw Maedoc’s book lying open; but though he saw it, it was left as it was. However, later on he remembered about it being open, and went to save it, and he found it dry and strongly bound, without injury to line or letter, and without a drop of rain having touched it.
A belief: If you tied a string to a bible and a key to the other end of the string, held the bible open and, while balancing the key on the tips of your fingers, called out the names of suspects of a theft, the key would fall the instant the guilty person’s name was uttered. This was sufficient cause for a woman in police court in 1832 to be charged with assault.
Up In Smoke
King Henry VIII’s anathema of obliterating the faces of God and Christ resulted in water damage.
In France in 1790, monasteries, having been suppressed, their booked gathered for burning. About 25K manuscripts went up in flames, with 4,169,000 printed volumes.
In Gascony, 150 years of history disappeared, “with the loss of the book, the actions of men of former ages sunk into oblivion.”
Books no longer cared for were cut up to wrap packages of incense.
The burning of the Alexandria library – “the losses to every branch of learning and culture stagger the imagination.”
Books and their Natural Enemies
rel:Book Worm
A moth ate words. That seem to me a curious occurrence when I learned of that marvel, that this worm gulped down the utterance of a certain main, this thief in the dark his illustrious discourse and its tough foundation. The pilfering visitor was not a whit the wiser becasue he had gulped down those words (solution: bookworm) – Riddle 47 of the Exeter Book, 10th century.
The Book Fish of Cambridge - June 23rd 1629 a fishmonger was cleaning a large fish for sale. In its belly was a book bound in parchment. A local passerby describes it in a letter
I saw with my own eyes – the fish, the maw, the piece of sail-cloth, the book and have observed all I have written. He that had his nose as near as I yester morning, would have been persuaded there was no imposture here without witness.
This is Vox Piscis - and the words were attributed to John Frith, who was imprisoned in a fish cellar in Oxford and later burned at the stake. It’s unclear how the original book entered the fish.
The destruction of vegetable based papyrus by millions of insects in nearly drove to distraction the sacred priests of On in biblical Egypt, who watched their books of science and their documents disappear.
Certain book dealers in ancient Greece and Rome would destroy the crisp look of new books to feign antiqueness, burying their books in heaps of grain: the vermin ages the papyrus and the grain gave it a yellowish cast.
Palimpsest and Book Thieves
Texts were sponged, or soaked in lime or lemon-juice to remove the text.
Pagan works were read, copied and protected, even if universally disagreed with – if only so they were to show the Catholics the errors of their Pagan (non-Catholic) ways.
A book curse, or anathema is seen in the bible:
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book – Revelations, 22:19
A notorious scholar, Mathaeus Flacius (Vlachich) would during the 16th century, disguise himself as a monk, and seek work in the German monasteries, stealing books which would serve his research. If a book was too heavy he’d slice out his research. So famous of this, his knife was known as cultellus Flacianus. (Flacius’s knife)
A Matter of records
rel:The Notebook - A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
How many fluent writers feed moths and bookworms, and only cooks buy their learned poems – Epigrams vi. 61
1890 - Frederic Kenyon deciphers a collection of Egyptian papyri that were recently discovered. They tell of accounts of the farm, not particularly interesting. But he thinks he recognizes a quote. As it turns out it was Artistotle’s Constitution of Athens, and he was the first reader in more than a thousand years.
