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... The Pythagoreans make Phaeton fall into Eridanus, burning part of its water, and glowing still at the time when the Argonauts passed by. Ovid stated that since the fall the Nile hides its sources. Rigveda 9.73.3 says that the Great Varuna has hidden the ocean. The Mahabharata tells in its own style why the 'heavenly Ganga' had to be brought down. At the end of the Golden Age (Krita Yuga) a class of Asura who had fought against the 'gods' hid themselves in the ocean where the gods could not reach them, and planned to overthrow the government. So the gods implored Agastya (Canopus, alpha Carinae = Eridu) for help. The great Rishi did as he was bidden, drank up the water of the ocean, and thus laid bare the enemies, who were then slain by the gods. But now, there was no ocean anymore! Implored by the gods to fill the sea again, the Holy One replied: 'That water in sooth hath been digested by me. Some other expedient, therefore, must be thought of by you, if ye desire to make endeavour to fill the ocean ...
In 1582 A.D. when Gregorius XIII updated the Julian calendar Canopus - the very bright (-0.72) α Carinae - was rising with the Sun 91 days after 0h. At that time, when the pope introduced his new Sun calendar, this could be said to be the day of the solstice This was also the day when the Sun reached the right foot of Castor (Tejat Posterior, μ Gemini). Hevelius has drawn the left foot of Castor (μ, Tejat Prior) deliberately not yet up on dry land, making a 'bay' in the 'heavenly Ganga' for this purpose:
It should here be noted that I have reversed the first 4 Rain God panels presented at the beginning of this chapter, reversed them from the original Mayan custom of reading from right to left. The original 3rd panel, for instance, has the Rain God's right foot in front, with evidently both feet of Castor and also the left foot of Pollux having been planted deep in the muddy soil of the bank of the river. Castor may have had one of his little toes still in the water:
The 22nd Chinese station Well (at Tejat Posterior) was presumably expressing the same basic idea as in Mahabharata but in another way. The Milky Way river had turned down to the right ('been brought down'), reasonably emptying itself completely, and therefore land had taken its place and water was now no longer directly accessible. You had to dig a well. When 0h was at the right foot of Castor the river was still in its place and his left foot (or at least the little toe of his left foot) would still be in the winter half of the year. He must have been facing east. At 0h was 'half tide':
Eridu was not only a name for Canopus (α Carinae, Agastya) but also the name of an ancient city of Sumer, a city close to the waters of both the slowly flowing Euphrates and the sea. Once Eridu surely must have been at the very edge of the sea, before Euphrates had delivered so much silt that it became an inland place:
It strikes me that south of the equator, where all the water should have accumulated after Canopus had drained the northern hemisphere, Easter Island should have the opposite phenomena. There the beginning of land was the 3 islets outside the southwestern corner of the island proper.
June-July was not the season when the Sun stood high but in the middle of winter and instead of 3 feet down in the wet mud and 1 foot up on dry land it was therefore reasonable to find the opposite, viz. 3 islets rising up from the sea followed by a stretch of water. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
