Tuesday 20 January 2009

The Proliferating Pyxis...



Meet the Pyxis (or rather 'pyxides' plural!). The latest peculiarities from the Bigfoot parallel paper dimension.

Pixys: (piksis) Latin - small box or casket. And a suitably impish or hobbish name to boot; equally fitting for their Cornish origins. Also where the word 'pixel' has its root.

Pyxis is also a charming constellation of ancient stripe, originally known as Pyxis Nauticus, the Mariner's Compass (a ship's compass in them days was housed in a chamber, or said 'box', and often fitted, with not insignificant reverance), traditionally placed at the base of the ships's mast (malus).

The wonderful site Constellations Of Words.com, carries some enticing and almost free-form riffing on the etymology and symbolism of the constellations. With a dash of the history and archaeology of astrology/onomy along the way, it will keep the most palsied and tangential of auto-didacts amused and off of the streets.

(For instance: Habitare comes from the Indo-European root *ghabh- Also *ghebh-. 'To give or receive'. An interesting nugget where the concept of 'home' is bound up with the concepts of conscious giving and conscious receiving...)

I'd like to offer some of these online for folks to grab, print & build for themselves, but I'm struggling to know how to publish them myself without the hassle of waking the (only occassionly available) webgoblin who valiantly built my website. If there's anyone who feels charitable enough to point me to a good free, online storage site where I could upload & link to PDFs, then you would be favoured among the firmament indeed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

why not use mediafire? that would be nice!

Unknown said...

Thanks for the notion...after some hunting about I discovered Weebly and it's neat (free under 5mb) PDF feature. From now on I will be posting all the toys from this blog via this page:
http://bigfootstudio.weebly.com/free-paper-toys.html
...among others ;D