When the Sun reached the Pleiades it could have meant his tanist twin had lost his grip over Mother Nature. ... Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk-customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him Shu, dated his origin as 17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis. He carries an oak-club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are the acorn; the rock-dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rocks; the mistletoe, or Loranthus; and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the glans penis in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its names viscus (Latin) and ixias (Greek) are connected with vis and ischus (strength) - probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, sperm being the vehicle of life. This Hercules is male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin, who is his tanist or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch - alternatively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest - and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic ...
When the Sun reached the Heart of the Serpent (Cor Serpentis, α) in day 314 + 3 = 317 this happened after 8 lunar synodic months counted from 0h. 317 - 80 = *237 = *0 + 8 * 29½ + 1.
... Alpheratz, Alpherat, and Sirrah are from the Arabians' Al Surrat al Faras, the Horse's Navel, as this star formerly was associated with Pegasus, whence it was transferred to the Woman's hair; and some one has strangely called it Umbilicus Andromedae. But in all late Arabian astronomy taken from Ptolemy it was described as Al Rās al Mar'ah al Musalsalah, the Head of the Woman in Chains ... A navel is at the midline of the body. At an equinox the Sun is at the midline between the pair of halfyears. And a 'heart' was used at the bottom of an astronomer's plumb line in order to find the correct star positions.
At the beginning of side a on the G tablet was the Chinese 5th station Heart and to make clear what was meant a hint was given in form of the Fox:
... The idea of a Fox at the 5th Chinese station with all probability was meant to let the thoughts fly away up to the famous Fox star in Ursa Major, Alcor close to Mizar:
This tiny star was traditionally used as a test for the eyes, to find out how sharp they were. According to Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names. Their Lore and Meaning: The Arabs in the desert regarded it as a test of penetrating vision; and they were accustomed to oppose 'Suhel' to 'Suha' (Canopus to Alcor) as occupying respectively the highest and lowest posts in the celestial family. So that Vidit Alcor, et non lunam plenum, came to be a proverbial description of one keenly alive to trifles, but dull of apprehension for broad facts. And in Hamlet's Mill: Proclus informs us that the fox star nibbles continuously at the thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth; German folklore adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end. This fox star is no other than Alcor, the small star g near zeta Ursae Majoris (in India Arundati, the common wife of the Seven Rishis, alpha-eta Ursae. Every astronomer should have known about the Fox star and therefore it would have been easy to associate the Heart ('load stone') in the Scorpion with Al-cor (a name which could allude to a 'heart'). The Fox rose at the same time as Spica (α Virginis) and there were then 45 (= 360 / 8) days from the Horn (tara) of Spica to the Heart (kopu) in the Scorpion:
Bayer assigned the Greek letter φ to the last star in Bootes - at the extremity of his Herculean Club and above Corona Borealis - which was at the opposite side of the year compared to when Acrux was culminating at midnight. At the time of rongorongo φ Bootis rose with the Sun 8 lunar synodic months after 0h.
... In other words, the ancient Druidic religion based on the oak-cult will be swept away by Christianity and the door - the god Llyr - will languish forgotten in the Castle of Arianrhod, the Corona Borealis. This helps us to understand the relationship at Rome of Janus and the White Goddess Cardea who is ... the Goddess of Hinges who came to Rome from Alba Longa. She was the hinge on which the year swung - the ancient Latin, not the Etruscan year - and her importance as such is recorded in the Latin adjective cardinalis - as we say in English 'of cardinal importance - which was also applied to the four main winds; for winds were considered as under the sole direction of the Great Goddess until Classical times. As Cardea she ruled over the Celestial Hinge at the back of the North Wind around which, as Varro explains in his De Re Rustica, the mill-stone of the Universe revolves. This conception appears most plainly in the Norse Edda, where the giantesses Fenja and Menja, who turn the monstrous mill-stone Grotte in the cold polar night, stand for the White Goddess in her complementary moods of creation and destruction. Elsewhere in Norse mythology the Goddess is nine-fold: the nine giantesses who were joint-mothers of the hero Rig, alias Heimdall, the inventor of the Norse social system, similarly turned the cosmic mill. Janus was perhaps not originally double-headed: he may have borrowed this peculiarity from the Goddess herself who at the Carmentalia, the Carmenta Festival in early January, was addressed by her celebrants as 'Postvorta' and 'Antevorta' - 'she who looks both back and forward'. However, a Janus with long hair and wings appear on an early stater of Mellos, a Cretan colony at Cilicia. He is identified with the solar hero Talus, and a bull's head appears on the same coin. In similar coins of the late fifth century B.C. he holds an eight-rayed disc in his hand and has a spiral of immortality sprouting from his double head.
Here at last I can complete my argument about Arianrhod's Castle and the 'whirling round without motion between three elements'. The sacred oak-king was killed at midsummer and translated to the Corona Borealis, presided over by the White Goddess, which was then just dipping over the Northern horizon. But from the song ascribed by Apollonius Rhodius to Orpheus, we know that the Queen of the Circling Universe, Eurynome, alias Cardea, was identical with Rhea of Crete; thus Rhea lived at the axle of the mill, whirling around without motion, as well as on the Galaxy. This suggests that in a later mythological tradition the sacred king went to serve her at the Mill, not in the Castle, for Samson after his blinding and enervation turned a mill in Delilah's prison-house. Another name for the Goddess of the Mill was Artemis Calliste, or Callisto ('Most Beautiful'), to whom the she-bear was sacred in Arcadia; and in Athens at the festival of Artemis Brauronia, a girl of ten years old and a girl of five, dressed in saffron-yellow robes in honour of the moon, played the part of sacred bears. The Great She-bear and Little She-bear are still the names of the two constellations that turn the mill around. In Greek the Great Bear Callisto was also called Helice, which means both 'that which turns' and 'willow-branch' - a reminder that the willow was sacred to the same Goddess ...
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