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[Nightingale]

#249 - silver - The Angel's Key - pixel set

[Nightingale]

Von's Clue:

[uneasyjd]

For what it's worth...

Arcturus - 4th brightest star in the sky, orange K1 giant, name means 'bear watcher' as it follows Ursa Major around the North Pole

Rigel - 7th brightest star in the sky, blue super-giant, name come from Arabic - rijl al-jauza - meaning 'the foot of al-jauza' or 'central one' (i.e. the foot of Orion)

[Nightingale]

I scanned throught the info on wiki about them late last night and found this very funny:

This relates to the spoiler in the second post so read at your own peril!

[rose]

I have several friends who are professional astronomers/astrophysicists (college professors at Columbia)- is this a problem worth taking up with them? I don't have this card yet - so I probably either need to trade for it or get a detailed scan. I have noticed each silver I have has smaller details when you look at it closely that aren't always clear from the scans.

[ammonite]

Okay, everything in medieval art has some kind of symbolic significance, so it's possible that there's a message in the painting that leads us to a book. Or it could be that this image appears in a medieval book somewhere, maybe something like the Book of Kells.

I've done a bit of digging this morning (i'm no art historian mind) and this is what I've found.

Starting with the angel and the bull, lion and eagle - this is a Tetramorph (a form bearing the four faces of lion, eagle, bull, and man), typically viewed as the positive Christian symbols of the four Evangelists (Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John). http://www.csuohio.edu/english/nr41.html

The Herdsman is the constellation Bootes, which is from the Hebrew root Bo (to come), meaning the coming. It is referred to in Psalm 96:13:

"For He cometh,
For He cometh to judge the earth;
He shall judge the world in righteousness,
And the people with His truth."

The stars of Bootes also represent Joseph, normally situated next to Virgo, which represent the Virgin Mary.
[img]http://www.usbible.com/Astrology/star_of_bethlehem.htm[/img]

The Hunter is Orion, Orion, one of the Titans of Greek mythology. There's a very good wiki article here. At the time of the birth of Christ, Sirius, the Star in the East, was on the meridian line, Orion, called "The Three Kings" by oriental astronomers, was in proximity; therefore the constellation Virgo, the Virgin, was rising in the east, and the line of the ecliptic, of the equator and of the horizon all met in that constellation. http://laluni.helloyou.ws/netnews/bk/bethlehem/beth1020.html

The horse jumping through a ring of fire is a bit out of place. The only reference I can find to this symbol is in the Nibelung Saga, from Norse Mythology and made famous by Wagner. Siegfried rode a horse through a magical ring of fire in order to awake Brunnhilde from sleep, a punishment imposed on her by her father Wotan.

It's not uncommon to mix religious traditions in medieval Christian art. For example, the 12th century floor mosaics in Otranto mix Islam, hebrew mythology, local history and signs of the zodiac. So maybe we are looking for a Christian artwork somewhere in Scandinavia that mixes Norse and christian traditions.

Or - there seem to be many symbolic connections pointing us towards the Nativity story. Maybe the book is the New Testament or one of the Gospels?

What fun! Makes a change from all that science I don't understand. Of course this will probably turn out to be about Hitchhiker's, like Nightingale says. I'm off to find my copy of The Name of the Rose. I'm sure there'll be some clues in there... [/url]

[uneasyjd]

[ammonite]

could someone who has this card try Ezekiel as the answer? Pretty please and thank you. I'll explain why in the unlikely event that it turns out to be right...

[Nightingale]

Hi ammonite,

I tried that this morning but unfortunately it didn't work. What was your reasoning behind it? I'd be very interested to know.

Nightingale

[ammonite]

The opening verses of Ezekiel speak of creatures with four aspects: ox (or bull), eagle, lion and angel. So I did some googling on Ezekiel + the various constellations and found this:
http://www.recoveredscience.com/astronomy_index.htm
a quick read of it seems startlingly close to our image - the angel is a means of looking at the heavens, a kind of ancient astronomy.

However this guy does appear to be something of a crack-pot and I couldn't find any corroboration of his theories elsewhere (found lots of HILARIOUS sites about the secret codes of the sphinx etc. though).

A detailed reading of Ezekiel might be worth a look if anyone's got a bible handy!

[ramsfan]

Found 2 books called The Silver Key, one gothic, the other cyber. Horse ?Pegasus. Could all the animals be constellations? Looked up Saint Michael of the Markets (thinking of St Michael of Marks and Spencer) and found St Michael's Court from Market Hill at Gonville and Caius (pronounced Keys) college Cambridge. Some pointers to the Books of Job and Enoch (?apocryphal book of the bible).

[Tonbo Karasu]

[Rube2k]

[GasparLewis]

[GasparLewis]