... 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 ...

... 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 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 Ash (Spear) succeeded the Oak (Club), and a way to describe this was to use the word to'a = 'murderer', in a jokingly way with the word for sugarcane (tôa). The Ash killed the Oak. ... Now to the last of the 7 'assassinators': Marikuru. ['Marikury' = Mercury] 1. A white, clayey earth. 2. A tree (Sapindus saponaria) of which very few specimens are left. Vanaga. Ash-wood T. Churchill.

... It happens that we know the Norse name of Gwydion's horse, if Gwydion was indeed Woden, or Odin. It was Askr Yggr-drasill, or Ygdrasill, 'the ash-tree that is the horse of Yggr', Yggr being one of Woden's titles. Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the Universe ...

GREDI (α Capricorni)

ι Phoenicis (357.3), ι Piscium (357.4), λ Andromedae (357.9)

κ Piscium (354.2), θ Piscium (354.4), υ Pegasi (354.9)

... τ, 4.5, with υ, was Al Sufi's Sa'd al Na'amah, which Knobel thinks should be Al Na'āim, the Cross-bars over a well; but they also were known as Al Karab, the Bucket-rope. The usual titles for τ - Markab and Sagma or Salma - are from Bayer, but the last two should be Salm, a Leathern Bucket ...

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