The Arma Christi [General discussion]

[-JKP-]

arca, you picked a good one to mention ( f44r) because usually plant leaves of that length and shape don't point up like that (unless the plant has been flattened for drying, which is what I thought might have happened).

And that tadpole tail coming out of the leaves is not a normal structure for plants. Little "tails" like this sometimes occur on the upper part of the leaf, sometimes near the attachment point of the leaf to the stem, sometimes flapping over a berry as in Ruscus, but not normally with a round "head" and sitting on the outer edge of a leaf. Plant roots can be pretty complex and I thought it MIGHT be some kind of hollow chamber structure as are found on some plants, but you are right, it's also somewhat like a ladder. Mostly I have been assuming the oddities had some mnemonic function, but the last week has been a big eye-opener in terms of how we might look at things, and the whole composition, like some of the others, seems to go beyond that.


I think I'm about to revise my classifications for the VMS plants in the first time in over a decade. I used to think of them as naturalistic, stylized (possibly mnemonic), and fanciful and I was never quite sure of the purpose of the ones that looked fanciful to me.

I'm beginning to think they might be better thought of as "narrative". If I had considered that they might be telling a story, rather than simply being some more complicated level of mnemonic, I might have caught on to this line of thinking sooner. If Koen is right about the kinds of imagery that might be encoded into the plants, then I think "narrative" might apply to some of them. We could just say "symbolic" (and I have used that term on occasion) but that doesn't quite seem to get across the idea that these "parts" might be part of a larger story, so maybe the word narrative is more applicable.