[Panel Session] Cryptologic History panel Oct. 19, 2017

[-JKP-]

-JKP-

Could you explain a little more about 

Absolutely no one draws two crayfish for Cancer

I'm not quite sure if I understand what you mean here.  Is that  "nobody does that today", or "no-one (so far as you know) ever did in medieval Europe"?  Also when you speak of drawing did you mean to say that the practice might have occurred in other media?.  I suppose you wouldn't have meant that nobody ever did so, anywhere.  

Also, are you speaking from personal experience, or is that something I may have missed in Dekker or in Dolan etc.?

If I quote you, I'd like not to misinterpret. Thanks

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I have collected more than 500 historic zodiac cycles (c. 1520 and earlier). I searched from the beginning of zodiac history until approx. 1520, from what is available on the Web, but I concentrated on those from about 1460 and earlier.

I searched every kind of medium: urns, mosaics, manuscripts, architecture, coins, talismans, jewelry, etc.


There are a few examples of double crabs representing Cancer (as distinct from the crayfish/lobster image) in both western and eastern manuscripts because the ones that lean more toward astronomy than astrology sometimes represent the constellations from both viewpoints (mirrored), but when they do, they do not single out Cancer (as occurs in the VMS)—the duplication was applied to most or all of the constellations, and the image was typically a crab, not a crayfish. I consider this different from the VMS in which the crayfish is singled out for duplication and is not in a series in which all the constellations are astronomically mirrored.


I don't know who Dekker or Dolan are. I found the zodiacs in primary sources. I didn't look for zodiacs in books about astrology unless they were historic books. Later zodiacs are pretty much standardized and not very interesting and have no bearing on the VMS.


I also assumed, when I made the statement above, that forum readers are intelligent enough to know that I mean "in resources found so far". There are hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that haven't been digitized yet. Perhaps there is a very rare example of a solitary double-crayfish Cancer symbol in an otherwise not-mirrored zodiac series somewhere in that vast storehouse that is not yet publicly available.


Also, the context of my statement is on a thread about whether the VMS is a fraud and I used the double crayfish as an example. This is not specifically a thread about constellations/zodiacs/astrology and thus my statement should be framed within that context.