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I think the enduring feature of the brilliant Orion figure - a feature not perturbed by the path of the Sun - was its position where the sky equator meets the Milky Way.

Today the Sun seems to avoid this position in space, because it occurs close to the solstice, high up in the sky for observers north of the equator and far down for observers south of the equator.

Orion is a figure to be looked at in the night and not a daytime person. A dweller on the back side, a person in the past and visible only in the winter (respectively in the southern summer) nights.

... The figure of Orion could be depicted in Ga1-29 (possibly also referring to the headless body of Rahu), with his left arm turned into a flowing river:


Ga1-29	Ga1-30	Ga2-1
*Al Han'ah-4*	Furud (94.9)	Well-22
TEJAT PRIOR (93.4), γ Monocerotis (93.5), κ Aurigae (93.6), κ Columbae (93.8)	Furud (94.9)	δ Columbae (95.2), TEJAT POSTERIOR, Mirzam (95.4), Canopus (95.6), ε Monocerotis (95.7), ψ1 Aurigae (95.9)
June 22 (173)	23 (540)	*24 (95)**
ºJune 18 (169)	19 (536)	*20 (91)**
'May 26 (146)	27 (513)	*28 (68)**
"May 12 (132)	*13 (53)**	14 (500)
η Sagittarii (276.9)	*Purva Ashadha-20*
η Sagittarii (276.9)	KAUS MEDIUS, κ Lyrae (277.5), Tung Hae (277.7)	KAUS AUSTRALIS (278.3), ξ Pavonis (278.4), Al Athfar (278.6)
December 22 (356)	*23 (277)**	24
*ºDecember 18 (272 = 2 * 136)**	19	*20 (354 = 12 29½)**
'November 25 (329)	*26 (250)**	27
"November 11	*12 (236)**	13 (317)

His theme is death (κ), i.e. life. I therefore decided to begin my description of glyph line Ga2 as follows:

... Men's spirits were thought to dwell in the Milky Way between incarnations. This conception has been handed down as an Orphic and Pythagorean tradition fitting into the frame of the migration of the soul. Macrobius, who has provided the broadest report on the matter, has it that souls ascend by way of Capricorn, and then, in order to be reborn, descend again through the 'Gate of Cancer'. Macrobius talks of signs; the constellations rising at the solstices in his time (and still in ours) were Gemini and Sagittarius: the 'Gate of Cancer' means Gemini. In fact, he states explicitly (I,12.5) that this 'Gate' is 'where the Zodiac and the Milky Way intersect'.

Far away, the Mangaians of old (Austral Islands, Polynesia), who kept the precessional clock running instead of switching over to 'signs', claim that only at the evening of the solstitial days can spirits enter heaven, the inhabitants of the northern parts of the island at one solstice, the dwellers in the south at the other ...

Considering the fact that the crossroads of ecliptic and Galaxy are crisis-resistant, that is, not concerned with the Precession, the reader may want to know why the Mangaians thought they could go to heaven only on the two solstitial days. Because, in order to 'change trains' comfortably, the constellations that serve as 'gates' to the Milky Way must 'stand' upon the 'earth', meaning that they must rise heliacally either at the equinoxes or at the solstices. The Galaxy is a very broad highway, but even so there must have been some bitter millenia when neither gate was directly available any longer, the one hanging in midair, the other having turned into a submarine entrance ...


Ga1-27	Ga1-28	Ga1-29
6h (91.3)	ξ Orionis (92.5)	*Al Han'ah-4*
ν Orionis (91.4), θ Columbae (91.5), π Columbae (91.6)	ξ Orionis (92.5)	TEJAT PRIOR (93.4), γ Monocerotis (93.5), κ Aurigae (93.6), κ Columbae (93.8)
*June 20 (91)**	solstice	22 (173)
*ºJune 16 (87)**	17 (168)	18
*'May 24 (64)**	25 (145)	26
*"May 10 (50)**	11 (497)	"May 12 (132)
Zhōngshān (274.0), π Pavonis (274.6)	ι Pavonis (275.1), Polis (275.9) ~~Menkar~~	η Sagittarii (276.9)
December 20 (354)	solstice	*22 (276 = 12 * 23)**
ºDecember 16 (350)	17	*18 (272 = 2 * 136)**
'November 23	*24 (248 = 8 * 31)**	25 (329)
*"November 9 (233)**	*10 (314 = 80 + 18 13)**	*11 (235)**

In its proper time and from the ashes of the dry old generation a new generation will rise: