RE: The existence of Culture V*
Koen G > 14-03-2017, 05:06 PM
You ask an interesting question, and to some extent I agree with your statement that there is no Culture V*, though I disagree with your conclusions.
I do understand your line of reasoning, and something similar to this is the first impression the manuscript imposes upon many viewers. But this reasoning is flawed, since it limits the options to two choices:
A) A manuscript is the product of one culture, like a European book of hours or an Egyptian Book of the Dead.
B) A manuscript is the creative product of an author.
Since (A) is not true (I agree), then your conclusion is that (B) must be the case. On top of that, for some reason you also add that:
C) The intention of this author was to form a puzzle, to deceive.
Now, © is a theory-specific addition to (B) - one can write a "different" work without the intention to fool others - so let's limit the question to (A) and (B).
So what you say is: "since we cannot easily pinpoint a culture that brought forth the manuscript, it must have been the brain child of an author."
If this is indeed what you mean, then I see some serious problems with the premises as well as the conclusion.
My main objection is that not all works of art can be pinpointed to one culture. Which culture produced the imagery in the Aratea manuscripts? Unraveling the cultural layers of such a manuscript is a lot like an archaeological dig in an ancient city that has seen several different layers of occupation. In the case of the Aratea, the very roots of the tradition lie even before the Greeks, in Mesopotamia. The Greeks, in their obsession to assign meaning to everything further specified the figures and fleshed out their lore, all of which was luckily safeguarded by the Carollingians who added their own layer, then further copied and/or corrupted by later copyists who often had no clue what they were doing since their culture was by now so far removed from the original makers of the imagery. And, very importantly, not all of these manuscripts have the same DNA. Some of them have hard to recognize influences from Egypt and Asia Minor, where most of the famed Greek astronomers had lived or studied.
Something very similar can be said about the various herbal traditions. Other forum members know more about those than I do.
The point is that subjects which are prone to form traditions, like herbals and astronomical works, have exactly the potential to produce something like the VM, since they don't exist in a sterile way within one culture, place or time.
On this subject, D'Imperio wrote (p.14-15) that the VM "plant parts frequently have a curious blocky, chunky, rough-hewn look, with platform-like structures surrounded by hard outlines defining a sharp change of plane. [...] A somewhat similar blocky, rough-hewn appearance is seen in some herbal drawings in other manuscripts, that have been copied over and over again from some earlier source by successive scribes."
Of course not all works that emerged from those traditions were blind copies. Especially in herbals there was selection, addition, correction, combination and so forth. Nothing says that those things did not happen in the VM. But that does not mean that the imagery was invented on the spot, in fact there are many arguments against that.
What I still have a hard time understanding is that so many people appear to believe that since no other manuscripts of the VM's direct tradition have been preserved, that the only conclusion can be that its imagery is mostly composed by a 15th century author.
Also, specifically to this post, no work exists without cultural influences. Can you provide any other example of a 15th century or earlier work of an "author" that seems to ignore much of the culture around him?