TRANSLATIONS
The link 'the oak' leads to:
"The seventh tree is the oak, the tree of Zeus,
Juppiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief ot 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 ..." (The White
Goddess) |
When the Latin alphabet has O at
full moon, in the middle, the Greek has their omega at the end. The
proverbial alpha is the spring bull (Taurus) and the letter omega may
therefore depict the end of sun at the western horizon:
Ω
The Latins used the month and the
Greeks the summer sun year. Full moon should be at the other end than
midsummer, i.e. at midwinter, the time of the moon.
The Gauls had presumably like the
Greeks their attention more on the sun than on the moon.
The Polynesians had two
possibilities to choose from, either to look at the moon or at the sun. New
year on Hawaii was a midwinter event, but maybe on Easter Island the
midsummer sun once marked new year? In Thursday (according to H) a gap is
evident at midwinter (the 'door'), but Father Thunder at midsummer was also
important.
With omega at the end and alpha at
the beginning another interpretaion is also possible. Moon rises in the west
and goes withershins. Omega is the beginning of the moon, and alpha her end.
The 'door' opens the way for the
spring sun, but he is finished - meets his end - at midsummer. At midsummer
the rainy season should be the beginning for the moon (she is associated
with rain), and her end will be at One Tea (new year). The Druids
were tree lovers and trees were associated with the moon, therefore their
year began at midsummer.
The link 'the twins' leads to this
page:
"In the Gospel of Mark III.17, the 'twins' James
and John, the sons of Zebedee, are given by Jesus the name of
Boanerges, which the Evangelist explains as meaning 'Sons of
Thunder'. This was long overlooked but eventually became the title
of a work by a distinguished scholar, too soon forgotten, Rendel
Harris. Here the Thunder Twins were shown to exist in cultures as
different as Greece, Scandinavia and Peru. They call to mind the
roles of Magni and Modi, not actually called twins, but successors
of Thor, in Ragnarok. But to quote from Harris:
We have shown that it does not necessarily follow
that when the parenthood of the Thunder is recognized, it
necessarily extends to both of the twins. The Dioscuri may be called
unitedly, Sons of Zeus; but a closer investigation shows
conclusively that there was a tendency in the early Greek cults to
regard one twin as of divine parentage, and the other of human. Thus
Castor is credited to Tyndareus, Pollux to Zeus ...
The extra child made the
trouble, and was credited to an outside source. Only later will the
difficulty of discrimination lead to the recognition of both as
Sky-boys or Thunder-boys. An instance from a remote civilization
will show that this is the right view to take.
For example, Arriaga, in
his 'Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru' tells us that 'when two
children are produced at one birth, which they call Chuchos or Curi,
and in el Cuzco Taqui Hua-hua, they hold it for an impious and
abominable occurrence, and they say, that one of them is the
child of the Lightning, and require a severe penance, as if they
ahd committed a great sin'.
And it is interesting to
note that when the Peruvians, of whom Arriaga speaks, became
Christians, they replaced the name of Son of Thunder, given to one
of the twins, by the name of Santiago, having learnt from their
Spanish (missionary) teachers that St. James (Santiago) and St. John
had been called Sons of Thunder by our Lord, a phrase which these
Peruvian Indians seem to have understood, where the great
commentators of the Christian Church had missed the meaning ...
Another curious and
somewhat similar transfer of the language of the Marcan story in the
folk-lore of a people, distant both in time and place ... will be
found, even at the present day, amongst the Danes ... Besides the
conventional flint axes and celts, which commonly pass as
thunder-missiles all over the world, the Danes regard the fossil
sea-urchin as a thunderstone, and give it a peculiar name. Such
stones are named in Salling, sebedaei-stones, s'bedaei;
in North Salling they are called sepadeie-stones. In Norbaek,
in the district of Viborg, the peasantry called them Zebedee
stones! At Jebjerg, in the parish of Cerum, district of Randers,
they called them sebedei-stones ...
The name that is given
to these thunderstones is, therefore, very well established, and it
seems certain that it is derived from the reference to the Sons of
Zebedee in the Gospel as sons of Thunder. The Danish peasant,
like the Peruvian savage, recognised at once what was meant by
Boanerges, and called his thunderstone after its patron saint.
This might have given pause to later hyperscholars
like Bultmann, before they proceeded to 'de-mythologize' the Bible.
One never knows what one treads underfoot." (Hamlet's Mill) |
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