07-11-2017, 08:04 PM
Cassiopeia occupies one of the most prominent locations in the Milky Way belt. And Galaxy mythology links it to a stream of animal milk. Just to say, the teats and streams of white liquid are very appropriate to Cassiopeia.
This doesn't exclude an anatomical reference though, since I hold that these images are explicitly layered by design. My real objection is, as I wrote in my latest blog post, that the specific organs as they are evoked here, do not correspond at all to the way medievals thought about these organs. We recognize them because exposure to modern medical diagrams has engrained specific shapes in our mind of the carefully isolated, idealized organ.
I have not been able to find an early 15th century depiction of the ovaries or uterus yet in which the horizontal properties are emphasized like this. Or anything close to our modern image of these organs, which the VM structure resembles. If such an early 15thC (or earlier) image were found, it would provide some basis for the organic theory.
This doesn't exclude an anatomical reference though, since I hold that these images are explicitly layered by design. My real objection is, as I wrote in my latest blog post, that the specific organs as they are evoked here, do not correspond at all to the way medievals thought about these organs. We recognize them because exposure to modern medical diagrams has engrained specific shapes in our mind of the carefully isolated, idealized organ.
I have not been able to find an early 15th century depiction of the ovaries or uterus yet in which the horizontal properties are emphasized like this. Or anything close to our modern image of these organs, which the VM structure resembles. If such an early 15thC (or earlier) image were found, it would provide some basis for the organic theory.