NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mysterious symbol
From: John Huth
Date: 2010 Oct 23, 16:23 -0400
From: John Huth
Date: 2010 Oct 23, 16:23 -0400
Wonders never cease! I should mention my own history with Stoke d'Abernon.
I was born in the UC London Hospital in St. Pancras while my father was on a 1 year fellowship there. They/we lived in Cobham, and I was baptized in Stoke d'Abernon. That was in 1958. My parents also have a rubbing of Sir John's brass.
When I revisited there in 1977, I met (or remet) the Pastor who baptized me, and purchased a brass enameled replica of the brass plate, which I still have with me. Alas, they no longer have any more.
Somewhat navigational issue - I was working on a lecture on time for my class the very morning of my most recent visit, and was curious about where the 12 hour/24 hour division of time came from. It's odd how you accept such things for so long without questioning them. When I saw the mass clock at Stoke d'Abernon, it was a tremendous revelation that, indeed some cultures did not subdivide the day into 12 parts.
For those of you not familiar with Saxon culture - I certainly was not - they divided the day into 8 "tides", and that clock indeed had 8 divisions of the day on it.
The 12/24 subdivision is, in fact, a bit sketchy, as it seems to be traced back to the Egyptian calendar, based on the work of a scholar named Neugebauer. I hadn't realized it was so obscure. I, for one, never realized how little I know.