3. But it could be the other way around, because the
prow of the Spring Ship pierces the dark cloth of night:
The Taoist philosopher
Zhuangzi once had a dream of being a butterfly flying without care
about humanity, however when he woke up and realized it was just a
dream, he thought to himself 'Was I before a man who dreamt about
being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a
man?'
Anyhow, this 'anti-world' (dream-world) perspective
explains the curious idea of Moon rising on a water-spout. Ohiro,
we know, is associated with Mercury and it is also the name of the
first night in the month:
Hiro
1. A deity invoked when praying for rain
(meaning uncertain). 2. To twine tree fibres (hauhau,
mahute) into strings or ropes.
Ohirohiro, waterspout
(more exactly pú ohirohiro), a column of water which
rises spinning on itself.
To spin, to twist. P Mgv.: hiro,
iro, to make a cord or line in the native manner by
twisting on the thigh. Mq.: fió, hió, to spin,
to twist, to twine. Ta.: hiro, to twist. This differs
essentially from the in-and-out movement involved in hiri
2, for here the movement is that of rolling on the axis of
length, the result is that of spinning. Starting with the
coir fiber, the first operation is to roll (hiro) by
the palm of the hand upon the thigh, which lies coveniently
exposed in the crosslegged sedentary posture, two or three
threads into a cord; next to plait (hiri) three or
other odd number of such cords into sennit. Hirohiro,
to mix, to blend, to dissolve, to infuse, to inject, to
season, to streak with several colors; hirohiro ei paatai,
to salt. Hirohiroa, to mingle; hirohiroa ei vai,
diluted with water.
Ta.: Hiro, to exaggerate. Ha.:
hilohilo, to lengthen a speech by mentioning little
circumstances, to make nice oratorial language.
Whiro
'Steals-off-and-hides'; also [in addition to a name of
Mercury] the universal name for the 'dark of the Moon' or
the first day of the lunar month; also the deity of sneak
thieves and rascals |
The movement in-an-out (hiri) is changed into
a twisting movement (hiro) in the 'anti-world'. Ohirohiro
(or more exactly pú ohirohiro) is a column of water which
rises spinning on itself. The straight Tree of fire becomes
its opposite, a swirling column of water.
The palm of the hand is rolling upon the thigh,
conveniently exposed by the crosslegged sedentary postury. We are at
a solstice, when Sun mixes with (hirohiro) Moon.
Or should we not say 'seasons', which on one hand refers to great measures
of time out in
the light and on the other hand to tiny spices inside the night.
The straight ure (penis) generates a spiral (ureure)
whirlpool when going down into the ocean (ure tiatia moana). On
the other side this becomes ureure-tu-moana, a waterspout:
Ure 1. Generation; ure matá,
warlike, bellicose generation (matá, obsidian,
used in making weapons). 2. Offspring; brother; colleague
i toou ure ka tata-mai, your colleague has turned up. 3.
Friendship, friendly relationship; ku-ké-á te ure,
they have become enemies (lit.: friendship has changed). 4.
Penis (this definition is found in Englert's 1938
dictionary, but not in La Tierra de Hotu Matu'a).
Ure tahiri, to gush, to spurt, to flow; e-ure
tahiri-á te toto, blood is flowing in gushes. Ure
tiatia moana, whirlwind which descend quickly and
violently onto the ocean; whirlpool, eddy.
Penis; kiri ure, prepuce, foreskin.
P Pau., Mgv., Ta.: ure, penis. Ureure, spiral.
Ta.: aureure, id. Urei, to show the teeth.
Mgv.: urei, to uncover the eye by rolling back the
lids. Pau.: Ureuretiamoana, waterspout. Ta.:
ureuretumoana, id.
H. Ule 1. Penis. For imaginative
compounds see 'a'awa 1, 'aweule, ulehala,
ulehole, ulepa'a, ulepuaa, ule'ulu.
Kū ka ule, he'e ka laho, the penis is upright, the
scrotum runs away (refers to breadfruit: when the blossom (pōule)
appears erect, there will soon be fruit). 2. Tenon for a
mortise; pointed end of a post which enters the crotch of a
rafter (also called ma'i kāne). Ho'o ule, to
form a tenon or post for the crotch of a rafter. 3. To hang. |
The Tree of Light is felled at midsummer because the time
horizon is there. It is cut down (koti):
Koti
Kotikoti. To cut with scissors (since
this is an old word and scissors do not seem to have
existed, it must mean something of the kind).
Kotikoti. To tear; kokoti,
to cut, to chop, to hew, to cleave, to assassinate, to
amputate, to scar, to notch, to carve, to use a knife, to
cut off, to lop, to gash, to mow, to saw; kokotiga kore,
indivisible; kokotihaga, cutting, gash furrow. P
Pau.: koti, to chop. Mgv.: kotikoti, to cut,
to cut into bands or slices; kokoti, to cut, to saw;
akakotikoti, a ray, a streak, a stripe, to make bars.
Mq.: koti, oti, to cut, to divide. Ta.:
oóti, to cut, to carve; otióti, to cut fine.
Pau.: Koti, to gush, to spout. Ta.:
oti, to rebound, to fall back. Kotika, cape,
headland. Ta.: otiá, boundary, limit. |
To complete my 'proof' I have to quote from The
White Goddess:
The seventh
tree is the oak, the tree of Zeus, Juppiter, Hercules,
The Dagda (the chief of the elder Irish gods), Thor, and
all the other Thundergods, Jehovah in so far as he was
'El', and Allah. The royalty of the oak-tree needs no
enlarging upon: most people are familiar with the
argument of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough,
which concerns the human sacrifice of the oak-king of
Nemi on Midsummer Day. The fuel of the midsummer fires
is always oak, the fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with
oak, and the need-fire is always kindled in an oak-log.
When
Gwion writes in the Câd Goddeu, 'Stout Guardian
of the door, His name in every tongue', he is saying
that doors are customarily made of oak as the strongest
and toughest wood and that 'Duir', the Beth-Luis-Nion
name for 'Oak', means 'door' in many European languages
including Old Goidelic dorus, Latin foris,
Greek thura, and German tür, all derived
from the Sanskrit Dwr, and that Daleth,
the Hebrew letter D, means 'Door' - the 'l' being
originally an 'r'.
Midsummer is the flowering season of the oak, which is
the tree of endurance and triumph, and like the ash is
said to 'court the lightning flash'. Its roots are
believed to extend as deep underground as its branches
rise in the air - Virgil mentions this - which makes it
emblematic of a god whose law runs both in Heaven and in
the Underworld ... The month, which takes its name from
Juppiter the oak-god, begins on June 10th and ends of
July 7th. Midway comes St. John's Day, June 24th, the
day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned
alive. The Celtic year was divided into two halves with
the second half beginning in July, apparently after a
seven-day wake, or funeral feast, in the oak-king's
honour.
Sir
James Frazer, like Gwion, has pointed out the similarity
of 'door' words in all Indo-European languages and shown
Janus to be a 'stout guardian of the door' with his head
pointing in both directions. As usual, however, he does
not press his argument far enough. Duir as the god of
the oak month looks both ways because his post is at the
turn of the year; which identifies him with the Oak-god
Hercules who became the door-keeper of the Gods after
his death. He is probably also to be identified with the
British god Llyr of Lludd or Nudd, a god of the sea -
i.e. a god of a sea-faring Bronze Age people - who was
the 'father' of Creiddylad (Cordelia) an aspect of the
White Goddess; for according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the
grave of Llyr at Leicester was in a vault built in
honour of Janus. Geoffrey writes:
Cordelia
obtaining the government of the Kingdom buried her
father in a certain vault which she ordered to be made
for him under the river Sore in Leicester (Leircester)
and which had been built originally under the ground in
honour of the god Janus. And here all the workmen
of the city, upon the anniversary solemnity of that
festival, used to begin their yearly labours.
Since
Llyr was a pre-Roman God this amounts to saying that he
was two-headed, like Janus, and the patron of the New
Year; but the Celtic year began in the summer, not in
the winter. Geoffrey does not date the mourning festival
but it is likely to have originally taken place at the
end of June ... What I take for a reference to Llyr as
Janus occurs in the closing paragraph of Merlin's
prophecy to the heathen King Vortigern and his Druids,
recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth:
After this
Janus shall never have priests again. His door will be
shut and remain concealed in Ariadne's crannies.
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 ... |
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. |
The manner
of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of
legends, folk-customs and other religious survivals. At
mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is
made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle
of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of
which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped
until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow
thongs in the 'five-fold bond' which joins wrists, neck,
and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he
faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a
mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the
altar-stone. His blood is caught in a basin and used for
sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and
fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of
oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a
lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder- or
cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log.
The
trunk is then uprooted and split into faggots which are
added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush in a wild
figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing
ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth.
The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the
genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood
boat and floated down the river to an islet; though the
head is sometimes cured with smoke and preserved for
oracular use. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the
remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed
by a new Hercules. |
The divine
names Bran, Saturn, Cronos ... are applied to the ghost
of Hercules that floats off in the alder-wood boat after
his midsummer sacrifice.
His tanist,
or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who
lighted Hercules' pyre and inherited his arrows,
succeeds him for the second half of the year; having
acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the
representative of the White Goddess, and by eating some
royal part of the dead man's body - heart, shoulder or
thigh-flesh.
He is in
turn succeeded by the New Year Hercules, a reincarnation
of the murdered man, who beheads him and, apparently,
eats his head. This alternate eucharistic sacrifice made
royalty continous, each king in turn the Sun-god beloved
of the reigning Moon-goddess.
But when
these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system
was gradually modified until a single king reigned for a
term of years, Saturn-Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year
ghost, permanently overthrown by Juppiter-Zeus-Belin
though yearly conjured up for placation at the
Saturnalia or Yule feast. |
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