Red-faced hunter

Crowd Science's end-of-year round-up led me to this 2017 article in The Conversation, which - among other things, recounts this astronomical symbolism from the aboriginal lore of Australia:

A Kokatha oral tradition from the Great Victoria Desert tells of Nyeeruna, a vain hunter who comprises the same stars, in the same orientation, as the Greek Orion.

He is in love with the Yugarilya sisters of the Pleiades, but they are timid and shy away from his advances. Their eldest sister, Kambugudha (the Hyades star cluster), protects her younger sisters.

Nyreeuna creates fire-magic in his right hand (Betelgeuse) to overpower Kambugudha, so he can reach the sisters. She counters this with her own fire magic in her left foot (Aldebaran), which she uses to kick dust into Nyreeuna’s face. This humiliates Nyreeuna and his fire-magic dissipates.

<idle-musing>
I wonder why both the Aborigines and the Greeks a few thousand years later decided that this constellation represented a hunter. No time for further research though.
</idle-musing>

The title of this paper rather gives the game away. 

Yes, Aboriginal Australians Can and Did Discover the Variability of Betelgeuse

<comment>
No prizes for the sequence of tenses, but it is only a preprint – not that that makes much difference...

<editorial-note>
In my experience as a technical writer (what I did didn't undergo  'peer-review' – in name, at least – but it was reviewed by my peers), peer review doesn't improve the writing; quite the reverse – it invites the influence of numerous mutually-exclusive grammatical bugbears. It may improve academic rigour, but it doesn't improve readability. 

</editorial-note>

... Come to think of it, hasn't it been peer-reviewed yet? 
</comment>

Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares.

L'Envoi

Interesting pattern in the waxing and waning (see what he did there?) of interest in Harmless Drudgery, not boding well for January 2024😗:

Signing off for 2023.

b

Update: 2024.02.22.10.00 – Typo /format fixes.

A tradition resurrected

Angelus ad virginem subintrans in conclave

Virginis formidinem demulcens inquit 'Ave' ...    

...as we sang last Saturday at All Saints Wokingham (at a concert that I did mention last time (so if you missed it you've only yourself to blame [and the 200+ people who came had a marvellous time]).

Resurrecting a practice observed several times in the early days of this blog....

<rip>

The earliest instance is here. I was reminded of it by the passing of a friend and erstwhile colleague {and long-valued commenter on this blog}, who would surely have ticked the No publicity box, so I shan't name her.

</rip>

... when I marked the festive season by taking a carol to bits, I am today looking at Angelus ad virginem; but just the first two lines as there's plenty to detain me there; and I'll begin in medias res, or more accurately in medias primae lineae: subintrans. Like the first word of that sentence ("resurrecting") it's a way of referring to an event without saying '<x> happened'. It's a present participle, or – to use the CELTA-approved abomination – "the -ing form". And it kicks off with two prepositions. the second one belonging to the verb intrare, which means, as you may have guessed, "to enter". But before that it says sub-, referring to the direction adopted by any angel worth his salt: downwards. He (it was a feller – you can tell that from the -us) came down into the conclave.

<anachronism-warning>
I am anything but an expert on domestic door furniture in nought-th-century Palestine, but I suspect Mary's room was not lockable. Readers of a musical bent will know from klavier and clef and clavichord that the -clave bit of conclave is a key. The clavicle is so-called because of its shape (not a Yale of course; more the sort of thing you might see on a medieval jailor's keyring.) And followers of papal doings will recognize the word 'conclave'; when the cardinals are electing a new Pope there's a lock-in to concentrate their minds.

<equivalent-anachronism>

The  one that everyone quotes is Shakespeare's clock  chiming the hour in Julius Caesar. And the one in this Annunciation  scene involves a similar timespan: from the year dot (when the angel comes down) to a medieval technology (when they have doors with locks).  Caesar's Rome did have an audible marking of time, just monthly rather than hourly, and not mechanical: the ritual calling out of the new month, which gives us the word calendar, as noted by Etymonline:

</equivalent-anachronism> 

</anachronism-warning>

 Whereupon the girl had ants in her pants....

<autobiographical-note>
(at least, I suppose that's where formidinis gets its meaning – from formis [=ant]). By using this colloquialism I would no doubt incur the wrath of Mrs Batty, a primary school teacher who thought that my daughter's "Mary was gobsmacked" (in a retelling of the Annunciation) was inappropriately irreverent. In my view it was a brilliant use of the vernacular, showing extraordinarily rich vocabulary in a 6-year-old (though maybe I'm biased).
</autobiographical-note>

... and the angel showed remarkable obtuseness in assuming that a simple "Ave" would demulcere anyone... 

<gloss>
The -mul- part of demulcens is presumably related to our "mollify".
</gloss>

...They'd win no prizes for self-awareness, these angels. 

That's enough for now. I'm half-expecting a review of the concert, but if it happens it'll have to go in an update.

b

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill

 In last Sunday's The Week in Westminster they were discussing the rights and wrongs of the Rwanda 'policy'...

<oh-yeah>
(less of a policy, it seems to me, than a gamble on the possible outcome of a tiny symbolic gesture)
</oh-yeah>

.... Sir Robert Buckland ...

<autobiographical-note>
(any relation, I wonder, of Graham Buckland, with whom I used to sing in Corpus Chapel Choir?)
</autobiographical-note>

... repeated the view reported in the Evening Standard last week:

“The ECHR [HD: European Court of Human Rights] underpins the very fabric of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement,” he told the BBC Sunday Politics programme.

He added: “To ignore that reality in the context of a debate about migration would be to threaten and endanger the Good Friday/Belfast process and once again undermine the position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.

“I think it would be a foolish or rash move… the wrong step and a very un-Conservative step for colleagues to take bearing in mind it was Conservative lawyers and politicians who helped draft the convention in those years after the war.

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill responds to the Supreme Court's ruling that the policy would be illegal because Rwanda was not safe, by hastily throwing some more money at Rwanda...

<weasel-words>
(Of course the official line is that they're not spending any more. But there are new procedures and restrictions that will inevitably mean more money is spent – not to mention the ongoing legal costs (millions) foreseen by Geoffrey Robertson KC in a recent World at One.)
</weasel-words>

 ...and decreeing that oh yes it is, so that's all right

But this one will run and run; it's a moving target. Latest news is that the Immigration Minister...

<parenthesis>
(whose name I can't dissociate from the smell of pilchards, because of a near-pun: 

 

</parenthesis>

... having introduced the Bill, has disavowed it as insufficiently inhumane and done a runner to the back benches to plot with Attila the Hen.

It's hard not to agree with Alastair Campbell in last week's The Rest Is Politics that the Tories have given up on governing and are spending their inevitable last few months laying political traps for an incoming Labour administration.

<image authorship="mine not Campbell's>
(Not unlike the Wagner group pulling out of Ukraine but leaving behind a devil's brew of booby traps and landmines)
</image> 

But I've got better things to do than chart the hissy-fits of HMG, notably, preparation for this:

It's already selling well, and should be a blast. Hokum all ye faithful.

b