11-09-2016, 04:01 PM
(11-09-2016, 01:03 AM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
An additional hint is that their number is fifteen. Are any sets of fifteen objects out there in magical or other traditions?
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Hipparchus (2nd century Greek astronomer) classified stars according to position and their relationship to telling time. Fifteen were considered to be of the first magnitude (the brightest).
Since the star imagery in the VMS varies from simple stars to those with dots in the center and those with bigger colored dots, the differences between them might indicate a hierarchy or some other distinction. If they do, the VMS illustrator and/or scribes may have been aware of the concept of orders of magnitude.
I learned about Hipparchus when looking into Ptolemy's Almagest, when I was researching ancient zodiacs. It is thought that Almagest is heavily influenced by the work of Hipparchus—his ideas survive through reports and misreports of succeeding writers and much of the knowledge was lost and gradually relearned. I wasn't able to determine exactly how much had an impact on medieval thinking about stars (mostly due to lack of time) since it involves tracing the traditions the transmitted the information through 12 centuries.
Clearly the medievalists had some skewed perceptions of the solar system. Besides the mistaken idea of the earth being the center, many of them treated planets and stars as the same kind of object and distinguished them only by brightness and whether they were "fixed" or moving "stars".