Devotion

In 1711, Belgian abbott Lucas de Vriese filled an unpublished book with 3,100 anagrams composed on phrases taken from the Latin version of the Bible. Page 81 is called the “echo page,” because the first word of each line echoes the last word of the preceding line. Each line is an anagram of the opening sentence of “Hail Mary”: Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum (Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee) occurring in Luke 1:28. Impressively, the whole thing is also an acrostic — taking the first letter of each line spells out the original quotation:

Amacula ter munda, ita per omnia viges.
Viges, enormi mulcta Adami pura enata.
Enata Malis pura vige, ac merito Munda.

Munda Mater emicas, o pura Geniti Aula.
Aula Dei micat, nota summe pura, Regina.
Regina, o Tu pura macula, et Dia Immensa.
Immensa, o Tu diva integre pura ac alma.
Alma ter unice pura Summa io Dei Gnata.

Gnata Dei, pura es communi a Mali reatu.
Reatu magno pura, micat sine lue Adami.
Adami sine omni macula pura, rege tuta.
Tuta o pergas alma ac nimia munda jure.
Iure mero Genita munda a culpis, Amata.
Amata veni Summa Regina, delicto pura.

Pura et ter divina o gemmas, Amica luna.
Luna pura (mira dico) Agni Stemmate Eva.
Eva, i matris culpa e gremio munda nata.
Nata maledicti pura, o vere Summi Agna.
Agna Coeli summa, et Avi ter pura damni.

Damni tu pura Regia es, et a macula omni.
Omni reatu, ac Avi plagis e matre munda.
Munda tu pia merito maculae es ignara.
Ignara culpae mera, o Summi Tu Dei Nata
Nata Pura Medica, et gloria Summa veni.
Veni multa munda, Pia et a gremio Sacra.
Sacra nimie munda, alme pura vige tota.

Tota piaculis munda mera, germina Eva.
Eva o simul prima et munda genita, Cara.
Cara, imo Summi Nata, et digne pura, vale.
Vale, o mendi pura Mater, ac Vitis Magna.
Magna, o sic pura ad literam, vive. Amen.

Here’s a rough translation, from City University of Hong Kong mathematician Felipe Cucker’s Manifold Mirrors: The Crossing Paths of the Arts and Mathematics:

Thrice clean from stain, that is why you blossom.
You blossom after being born free of Adam’s great curse.
Born of sinners, you blossom pure and clean, due to your own merit.

Clean you shine, Mother, oh pure Temple of the Only Begotten Son.
God’s Temple shines, famous for its great purity, oh Queen.
Oh Queen, you who are free of stain, incommensurable Divine.
Oh incommensurable, you are divine, immaculately pure and nourishing.
Nourishing, thrice peerlessly pure, oh greatest daughter of God.

Daughter of God, you are free from original sin.
Free from the greatest sin, you shine free from Adam’s curse.
Pure, clean of Adam’s stain, protected queen.
Continue protected, oh nourishing and so justly clean.
Justly Daughter free from guilt, Beloved.
Come, oh Beloved, greatest Queen, free from guilt.

Pure and thrice divine, you are adorned with gems, oh loving moon.
Pure moon (I speak of marvelous deeds), Eve of the Lamb’s lineage.
Eve, go, born free from guilt in her mother’s womb.
Born free from blame, truly Lamb of the Highest.
Greatest Lamb of Heaven and thrice free from the Ancestor’s harm.

You, oh, Queen, are free from harm and from stain.
From all sin and from the Ancestor’s calamities you are free since birth.
Clean through your own merit pious, you have not known any stain.
Merely ignorant of the guilt, oh you, born from God the Highest.
Born Pure, Healer, come also oh Highest in glory.
Come clean from punishment, Pious and Holy from your mother’s womb.
Sacred, mightily clean, motherly pure, you live protected.

Bloom protected, you, the only one clean from expiatory punishment, Eve.
Oh Eve, first born as well as clean, Beloved.
Beloved, truly born from the Highest and fittingly pure, be strong.
Be strong, oh Mother free from fault, and Great Vineyard.
Great, oh truly pure, live. Amen.

(Via Walter Begley’s Biblia Anagrammatica, or, The Anagramatic Bible, 1904.)

March 22, 2022March 21, 2022 | Language · Religion

Remaking the World

In 2000, University of Maine geological scientist Roger LeB. Hooke estimated that human beings now move more earth than any other geomorphic agent, 6 metric tons of earth and rock per capita each year (31 tonnes in the United States!), for a global total of about 35 billion tonnes.

For comparison, ancient Egypt moved 625 kg per capita per year, Easter Island 260 kg, and the Mayan city of Copán 665 kg. Rome, at its zenith, including the roads, moved 3.85 tonnes of earth per person each year. Hooke estimates that the earth we’ve moved in the last 5,000 years could build a mountain range 4,000 meters high, 40 km wide, and 100 km long. And if the current rates of increase persist (mostly due to technology and population growth), that mountain range could double in length by 2100.

“One may well ask how long such rates of increase can be sustained, and whether it will be rational behavior or catastrophe that brings them to an end.”

(Roger LeB. Hooke, “On the History of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” Geology 28:9 [September 2000], 843-846.)

March 21, 2022March 20, 2022 | History · Technology

Going in Style

In Ghana, coffins can be works of art. The tradition is particularly strong among the Ga people of the Greater Accra Region, whose kings were historically borne on figurative palanquins that bore the shapes of their family totems to ensure protection by the associated spirits.

Modern carpenters extended this tradition in the 20th century, dropping the spiritual function and expanding their inspirations to remember the dead one’s occupation or personality. In 1951 two carpenters buried their 91-year-old grandmother in a coffin shaped like an airliner because she had said she often daydreamed of flying. Today businessmen are often buried in coffins shaped like luxury Mercedes, and other recent designs include birds, fish, cars, shoes, butterflies, crabs, pineapples, lions, pigs, mobile phones, books, fire engines, toothpaste tubes, wrenches, cheetahs, eagles, and pianos.

March 21, 2022March 20, 2022 | Death

Suspense

One April Fool’s Day, when logician Raymond Smullyan was 10 years old, his brother told him, “Today I am going to trick you like you have never been tricked before.”

“Little Raymond waited, and waited, and waited, and nothing happened,” writes Ron Aharoni in Circularity. “To this very day, he is not sure whether his brother tricked him or not.”

March 20, 2022 | Science & Math

The Value of an Education

Imprisoned during the French Revolution, zoologist Pierre André Latreille found a beetle on the floor of his dungeon. He pointed out to the prison doctor that it was the rare Necrobia ruficollis, described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775. Impressed, the doctor sent it to a local naturalist, who knew Latreille’s work and managed to secure the release of Latreille and a cellmate.

All the other inmates were executed within a month.

March 19, 2022March 18, 2022 | Science & Math

A Double Man

I seem to be on a Sherlock Holmes kick lately. A few oddities about Dr. Watson:

In A Study in Scarlet he says he was wounded in the shoulder, but in The Sign of Four he says he was wounded in the leg. One theory resolves this by suggesting that he was bending over when hit, and that the bullet passed through his leg and lodged in his shoulder. (The BBC series Sherlock sidesteps the problem by saying that Watson’s limp is a psychosomatic symptom of post-traumatic stress.)
He seems uncertain about his first name. In “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” Watson says that his dispatch box is labeled “John H. Watson, M.D.,” but in “The Man With the Twisted Lip” his wife Mary calls him “James.” Dorothy L. Sayers offers another neat resolution: Maybe his middle name is Hamish, the Scottish equivalent of James.
It’s not clear how many times he’s been married. He certainly married Mary Morstan, whom he met in The Sign of Four. But then in “The Empty House” he refers to “my own sad bereavement,” and in “The Blanched Soldier” Holmes mentions that “The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association.” This seems to suggest that Watson remarried after Mary’s death, but this is never made clear, and a second wife is never named.

At its annual dinner, the Sherlock Holmes literary society the Baker Street Irregulars always toasts the second Mrs. Watson. This was the toast in 2002:

Watson had a second wife
But, did he lead a double life?
He had two wounds; he had two names
(One was John, the other James).
He often claimed he dined alone
Yet quaffed whole bottlesful of Beaune.
He’d disappear for days on end
Accompanying his clever friend,
Then lame excuses where he’d been
Were published in Strand Magazine.
And so to the spouse of this pain in the ass
We raise a toast and lift our glass.

(From Roger Johnson and Jean Upton, The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany, 2012.)

March 18, 2022March 17, 2022 | Literature

Male Run

Mr. and Mrs. Emory Harrison of Jonesboro, Tenn., had 13 children, all boys, making the largest all-male American family in 1955.

Amazingly, they made this crowded life seem pretty easy. Emory told the St. Petersburg Times that they spent only $12 to $15 a week on food, since they could grow most of what they needed on their 70-acre farm. And he boasted that he’d spent less than $50 on medical bills in 22 years of married life.

The Harrisons found immortality in algebra textbooks, which are forever asking the odds of this outcome. If both genders are equally likely, the chance is 1 in 8,192.

March 18, 2022March 17, 2022 | Oddities

Exploring Made Easy

A tiny detail, but I thought it was interesting: Scottish writer Henry Drummond believed that sub-Saharan Africa was so well networked with footpaths that an explorer could walk from Zanzibar westward “never in fact leaving a beaten track” until “his faithful foot-wide guide lands him on the Atlantic seaboard.” From his Tropical Africa of 1888:

Now it may be a surprise to the unenlightened to learn that probably no explorer in forcing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than a few days at a time, been off some beaten track. Probably no country in the world, civilized or uncivilized, is better supplied with paths than this unmapped continent. Every village is connected to some other village, every tribe with the next tribe, every state with its neighbour, and therefore with all the rest. The explorer’s business is simply to select from the network of tracks, keep a general direction, and hold on his way.

This is repeated in J.W. Gregory’s The Story of the Road (1931) and in M.G. Lay’s Ways of the World (1992). Gregory admits only afterward that this may have been true in Nyasaland, the district that Drummond had visited, but it’s hardly the case elsewhere. “One evening, after the porters had suffered one of many repeated disappointments at not finding a human path, I removed their gloom, as they sat around the camp fires, by translating to them the passage from Henry Drummond. Their laughter showed that they concluded that the reports of European travellers, like those they told themselves on their return to the coast, were not always to be taken literally.”

March 17, 2022March 16, 2022 | Oddities

In a Word

apolactize
v. “to spurne with the heele” (from Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie of 1623)

tripudiary
adj. pertaining to dancing

Any stranger behind the scenes at Her Majesty’s Theatre on the opening night of Adeline Genée and the Imperial Russian Ballet would have been amazed (stated The Melbourne Age on Monday) at a little incident that was enacted just before Mlle. Genée made her entrance from the wings. Mr. Hugh Ward approached the great dancer, and, raising his foot, kicked her on the leg. The astonishment would have increased on it being noticed that Mlle. Genée, far from being incensed at this apparent liberty, was greatly pleased at it, and rippled with laughter. Mlle. Genée explained the incident in this way. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘while I am not exactly over-superstitious, there are still some little things I pay regard to, and one of them is that before I make my first appearance anywhere I must be given a ‘good luck kick’ prior to making my entrance. I mentioned this jokingly to Mr. Ward when I arrived in Sydney, and he said it would give him the greatest pleasure to present me with the lucky kick on the opening night of the season. So he has come all the way from Sydney to do so.’

— Adelaide Register, June 25, 1913

March 17, 2022March 16, 2022 | Language

First Things Last

In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus encounters his mother in Hades and asks her seven questions. She answers all seven, but strangely in reverse order:

A – What killed you?
B – A long sickness?
C – Or Artemis with her arrows?
D – How is my father?
E – How is my son?
F – Are my possessions safe?
G – Has my wife been faithful?

G – Your wife has been faithful.
F – Your possessions are safe.
E – Your son is thriving.
D – Your father is alive but in poor condition.
C – Artemis did not kill me with her arrows.
B – Nor did a sickness kill me.
A – But my longing for you killed me.

This reversal is called chiasmus, and it appears throughout oral literature. Apart from its aesthetic effect, it’s thought that it may have helped ancient poets to remember long passages and to recall the structure of a complex story. Of the Iliad, classicist Cedric Whitman writes, “Not only are certain whole books of the poem arranged in self-reversing, or balancing, designs, but the poem as a whole is, in a way, an enormous hysteron proteron, in which books balance books and scenes balance scenes by similarity or antithesis, with the most amazing virtuosity.”

Some of these patterns are wrought on such a huge scale that it’s hard to believe that a listening audience could even recognize them. Why then offer them? Whitman gives two reasons. One, a poet might perform a feat of virtuosity for its own sake, even if the audience overlooks it. And two, “The human mind is a strange organ, and one which perceives many things without conscious or articulate knowledge of them, and responds to them with emotions necessarily and appropriately vague.”

(Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 1958; and Steve Reece, “The Three Circuits of the Suitors: A Ring Composition in Odyssey 17-22,” Oral Tradition, 10:1 [1995], 207-229.)

March 16, 2022March 15, 2022 | History · Literature