April 9th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
A Breast For Every Star
A cropped version of this image has been floating around on Twitter recently:
When first I saw it, my thought was “Wow, and I thought manga was weird!”
Once source offers this hard-to-scrute academic citation for the image: “Von den 36 Sternbildern, Regensburg ca. 1491. Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 832, fol. 92r.” Well, that tells me … nothing! (Although it would probably serve as a finding aid if I were in Heidelberg.)
Slightly more illuminating is this Google Books search result. It would seem that “Astronochus” was a constellation name, and that our “centaur-like” many-breasted beast was the fanciful animal shape imagined to be depicted in the stars.
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These are the people who kept putting rabbit-men shooting crossbows in their manuscripts, I wouldn’t put anything past them!
This other picture from a few decades earlier looks much more like it says Astronothus. This makes more sense as it could be a combination of two Greek words – ΑςτÏονόθος – star-bastard.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=628954797176398&id=490275581032323
If people were imagining fanciful creatures living on other planets in 1491, that seems pretty advanced, particularly considering that they didn’t know about the Americas at that time.