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Scorecards, Quasicrystals, "Medical Witch"'s Manual - Printable Version

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Scorecards, Quasicrystals, "Medical Witch"'s Manual - kgladman - 02-07-2020

Hello all,

I am new here so forgive me if this has already been thoroughly discussed.

Has anyone explored the possibility that the text might be neither plain text nor a cipher, but a kind of text that is generated in the course of some activity?  I know that people have speculated that one section contains recipes, which are a different kind of text than ordinary connected prose, but I am thinking about things like scorecards one keeps in bowling or other games, tic-tac-toe, and so on. . . not because the text looks like any of those in particular.  But it occurred to me (as it may have done to others) that if one were to come as an alien to Earth and look at tic tac toe sheets or tally sheets and things like that, it might not be obvious at first that they differed radically from pages full of words.  

I don't know enough about the culture of the time and place that produced the book to speculate what the activity would be that in this case produced text.  Maybe abbreviations for prescriptions?  Or medical records of people who had been treated by a medical person (levels they had received of this or that drug at different times and counts of how often different symptoms occurred before and after, etc.)? This is just wild speculation, but could it possibly have been the records of a gynecologist/obstetrician, who was not just creating an herbal, but creating a medical theory, with evidence to back it up of actual patients treated, of how and why various herbals worked (so that the drawings were metaphorical, and meant to illustrate principles, like:  this composite-plant shows you at a glance the key features--in terms of type leaves, taste of tincture, etc.--that plants which are usable for a given purpose--like abortifacients or aphrodisiacs or what have you---tend to have.  No matter where you are on earth. It might even include theoretical explanations of why this is so, like because the plants co-evolved or whatever.  But that the point is a practical one: so that you can use this manual if you are a wanderer, like the Roma or Sinti.  Maybe Sinti--not sure of the difference.)  

Anyhow I wonder if this might explain why it is done with costly materials but the artist's hand is not highly accomplished as an illustrator, and its in a small portable size, and looks like it has been rebound multiple times and had pages lost, and yet has plants and constellations that seem fanciful (the constellations are maybe common mis-rememberings of foreign skies by travelers from another hemisphere; or they are records of dimensional travel.  Is it true that the constellations are earth-inaccurate, and if so, has anyone checked whether the constellations actual exist if you were standing on the surface of some other planet, like the one the Dogon allegedly came from?  This no longer sounds as impossible as it did before 2017, when the Pentagon announced it thought aliens could be real.) Many of those things would be consistent with it being a Sinti physician's set of professional documents--this person needed all these things as reference, because they used herbs for medical care, also let the stars help them decide on which remedy to use when, etc.   I think it's generally agreed it's a reference work, correct?

It also makes me think that if it were some kind of a text like that, it would make sense that it always seems like a language the reader does not speak.  Because it is language-like, "linguistic" without being a natural language.  It is TOO regular, as a number of commentators including I think Lisa Fagan Davis (who so kindly made me aware of this forum) have said.  As it would be, if it is not an attempt to commit to writing a natural language (which always struggles back against attempts to tame it by punctuation and other typographical conventions), but rather a kind of text dominated by record-keeping abbreviations and conventions of shorthand.  It is, perhaps, to language as quasicrystals are to crystals, in the sense that it "fools you" at first glance.

Anyhow I would LOVE to hear from anyone here about what has already been done in this area.  I bet there has been some great stuff, but that there is also a lot more to be done, and I would love to help (I am a former CompLit scholar now teaching finance at BU and just checking in here for pleasure, but would love to help any academics for whom this is professionally useful).

I also dream of involving the European Roma and Sinti communities, especially those who have a continuous cultural connection to the region of Italy in which the artifact's initial manufacture took place (bearing in mind that it may have been written "on the road,") in the quest to decipher it, given that I am far from the first to have theorized they might have created it.  (Perhaps this has been started?)  There is an article on the internet about Romani "witches" of the modern day who claim to be practicing both healing and aggressive magic for clients, in a physician-like way.  They might be a thought partner to explore this further:  could it be the records of a "medical witch" they count among their forbears?

If needed, I believe we could get crowdfunding and possibly other support from the socially responsible investment community in the United States and England for this work (for reasons I can explain later).

Anyhow let me know if any of this is of interest to others.  It is wonderful to be here.  

Thanks----Kimberly


RE: Scorecards, Quasicrystals, "Medical Witch"'s Manual - -JKP- - 02-07-2020

Hello Kimberly, welcome to the forum.

The VMS doesn't necessarily originate in Italy. It may have traveled there from Prague and prior to that it could have come from anywhere. Its origin hasn't been determined yet.