Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Years ago, in an Old French to French dictionary, I noticed that one of the definitions of mors referred to the bite of a scorpion. Not until hundreds of years later would they begin using Greek letters to name stars but it was always easy enough to envision that those names referred to stars.

In medieval manuscripts the words morsure, morsure, morsu, mors (and various other spellings) were used more generally. Most of the time they were referring to bite/sting (which could be dog bite, serpent's bite, scorpion sting, etc.), not specifically to scorpion sting. You will see these words very frequently in medieval herbals, where a plant is supposed to help treat a bite/sting.


Morten St. George: "Where do you see a four-legged critter with elevated tail that curves around?"


The curled tail in the VMS scorpion is similar to some of the lizard-style Scorpius sculptures in 12th to 15th-century church portals in northeastern France/Normandy that featured zodiac cycles. The tail was not always elevated (some were sculpted from the top rather than the side). The lizard-style Scorpius in manuscript art appears to have been derived from earlier sculptural art, since the sculptures precede the lizard-style Scorpius drawings by a couple of centuries.