Mostly M's..

1. And..mandorla. The word mandorla comes from decorative arts and is the Italian word for almond. It stands for an oval-shaped panel or recess in which a figure of Christ or Mary is placed or painted. The Century has great picture of Christ sitting within a mandorla and giving a blessing with his right hand. Here is a drawing from a medieval architecture page which shows this motif. But we can take things further than this. As this site and diagram teach us, a mandorla is the ancient (pre-Christian) symbol of two circles coming together, overlapping one another to form an almond shape in the middle. The "philosophy of the mandorla" includes a reflection on what this "middle space" communicates. It is the place where two opposites "meet" and is therefore somewhat of a liminal or "threshold" space. The two circles pictured in the link represent two opposites, such as "heaven" and "earth." The almond-shaped meeting place is the intersection, where we live, partaking both of the heavenly and earthly realms. This kind of figure, then, stimulates the imagination of a certain kind of psychologist, who wants to reflect on "living in the limen," so to speak. I find the "single-almond," standing on its end and surrounding Christ or Mary, an interesting artistic motif but I don't get too excited, at this juncture, about psychological readings of the almond shape produced by two overlapping circles.

2. Well, let's return to "earth" with the word maltha. It was, originally, "a kind of cement made by mixing pitch or lime with wax, fat, sand, and other ingredients." After that it described a viscid form of bitumen and then any viscid form of natural asphalt--also called mineral tar. Thus, it isn't quite asphalt nor is it petroleum. It, like the mandorla, seems to lie in the middle. Holland's 1601 translation of Pliny's Historia Naturalis used the word: "In a city of Comagene, name Samosatis (Samosata), there is a pond, yeelding forth a kind of slimie mud (called Maltha) which will burne cleare..." I don't think you want to take a dip in it...

3. Mammock is a noun or verb, and since the verb use was coined by Shakespeare, I will provide the meaning of both here. As a noun mammock means "a scrap or shred, a broken or torn piece." From 1935: "Each man singed a mammock of mutton on a stick and ate it in the empty tent." Let's learn another word. From 1870: "This gangrel thief thought fit to tread/ The grass to mammocks by my head!" A gangrel is a vagabond or, as an adjective, "vagrant or vagabond." The verb mammock keeps the reference to scraps or shreds, but means "to break, cut, or tear into fragments or shreds." Shakespeare uses it in Coriolanus (I.iii.67): "Hee did so set his teeth, and tear it./ Oh, I warrant how he mammokt it." The origin of the word is uncertain, but now we know its use...

4. Murrey is short for "mulberry" and designates a reddish color in heraldry. More precisely it is "a reddish purple or blood red." As the one-sentence Wikipedia article states, it is "somewhere between gules (red) and purpure (violet) and somewhat like maroon. The OED tells us that some authorities regard murrey as a distinct heraldic tincture while others say it is the same as sanguine. I am not too sanguine at coming to a conclusion on this one...

5. When we arrive at mangonel, we encounter an embarrassment of riches--in medieval terms for catapults. There are bricoles, trebuchets, onagers and mangonels. The mangonel was introduced before the trebuchet, and was a more primitive form of it. That is, the mangonel threw projectiles in a low trajectory and higher velocity than the trebuchet, with the intention of breaching walls, while the trebuchet was used to lob objects over walls, like a huge slingshot. Earlier still was the onager, going back to Roman times. Interesting for me is that the onager derived its name from the wild ass, Equus hemionus onager, native to northern Iran. The Greek words underlying it are onos (ass) and agrios (wild). The siege engine was so named because its torsion system gave a considerable "kick" to the hurled objects. Well, when the first trebuchets started rolling of the assembly lines in the 13th century, I am sure that people thought that here was the ultimate in weaponry. After all, it could throw things, such as burning objects, into a city, thus destroying it without even entering. But, life changes, and by the middle of the next century gunpowder, which had been invented by the Chinese, was used in European battles. What had seemed to be such a secure and huge technological advance was soon as outmoded as the manual typewriter is today.

6. Let's conclude with menstruum, which most people would naturally think has something to do with a woman's menstrual cycle. Indeed, the Latin word menstruum means "menstrual discharge," and the word first came into English with that meaning. But then, medieval alchemy took over some of the Latin reproductive and sexual terms to characterize the "mixing" of elements or the "discharge" of various substances, and menstruum took on the meaning of a "solvent, esp. one for dissolving metal in the attempt to convert base metals into gold." The great natural historian Conrad Gesner, who wrote in Latin, first used the term in this way. His work, Treasure of Euonymus, was translated into English in 1559: "After the metalles shall be dissolved set them to be destilled in a fire of the first degree, and the Menstruum shall issue forthe, and the lime or powder of ye metal shall remaine in the bottome." Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wanted to create a genre of American literature, did so in this case by using this rare word in his work. In his Essays he says: "The intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless menstruum."

Even though the ideas are flowing for me now, I will stop for tonight...

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