tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5006149227755828619.post3163218454868501385..comments2024-02-28T07:39:18.803+00:00Comments on Clay Testament: Chitter-ChatterEric Maderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10612913626447216776noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5006149227755828619.post-81227709131842164872011-10-13T05:50:18.960+01:002011-10-13T05:50:18.960+01:00Of course Burrelhead's thesis put the squirrel...Of course Burrelhead's thesis put the squirrel/Hermes connection in question for a time. But Hunt (and myself as well, I might add) would argue that Burrelhead's work suffered from the limited sampling of squirrels he interviewed (certainly Cambridge squirrels do not speak for ALL squirrels) and was superseded in any case by Constance Branch's 1952 study of the impact of the interwar Oak Blight. Branch, you might remember, proved that east coast squirrels' acorn consumption dropped from an average of 3.8 acorns a day to 0.5 acorns a day as a direct result of the blight. He further documented instances in which the hermetic Avatar /adjusted/ its epithet to match the new dietary regimen. Many squirrels interviewed, in various locales, had begun referring to themselves as "Hermes Demimegistus". Branch thus concluded that the Avatar's self-perception was indeed influenced by diet, as Burrelhead had discovered, but that this self-perception adjusted according to what Branch called "nutty circumstance".<br /><br />Hunt I think rightly follows Branch's methodology. Some scholars in rodent studies ignore Branch because of his later, more speculative work (cf. his widely derided 1966 thesis that the hermetic maxim "As it is above, so it is below" referred to the quality of acorns on the tree vs. the quality of fallen acorns) but this, I believe, again along with Hunt, only manages to cut them off from a veritable vein of unmined rodential gold that still awaits extraction in early Branch. <br /><br />Thanks for your comments, Ullrich.Eric Maderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10612913626447216776noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5006149227755828619.post-33729636991460832782011-10-12T23:54:07.950+01:002011-10-12T23:54:07.950+01:00Neither Hunt nor Greimas, apparently, took account...Neither Hunt nor Greimas, apparently, took account of the definitive study of squirrel avatars, published in 1911 by A. J. S. Burrelhead (Annals of the Society of Friends of Park Bench Zoology, IV-V). Burrelhead demonstrated, by deductive reasoning, that squirrels could not be descendants of Hermes, because the latter's most recent incarnation, as Hermes trismegistus, relies on the number three to express his power, whereas squirrels, when asked, were uninterested in the number three as opposed to any other greater number of nuts.ullrichnoreply@blogger.com