However, new information trickles in from my evening TV programs. First an easy piece to digest. The nature of Australia was the subject matter and it became very clear for me that the World Tree growing on this southern strange continent down under the equator should be the Eucalyptus. No other tree could survive in such a hot and dry interior.

This World Tree should therefore be compared to for instance the Oak in Europe and the Ceiba in the land of the Mayas.

... 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 ...

... I already knew that the ceiba tree was the model for the sacred World Tree of the Maya, but I had never seen one in flower when I knew what I was looking at. I was really excited because normally you can't see the blossoms even if you're there when the tree is in blossom. The fully mature trees are hundreds of feet high. and the blossoms are very small. 'It's a ceiba', I chirped and began looking for a branch low enough to see one of the blossoms up close. Joyce Livingstone, a retired teacher, did the logical thing. She bent over, picked up a fallen branch, and held it out for me to see. I was too excited and full of myself to listen. She tapped my arm more insistently and still I didn't hear her. Finally, in frustration, she grabbed my wrist and raised her voice. 'Will you look at these?' she said, waving the branch, and finally I did. What I saw stunned me, for in her hand lay a perfect replica of the earflares worn by the Classic Maya kings. Suddenly I understood the full symbolism of so many of the things I had been studying for years. The kings dressed themselves as the Wakah-Chan tree, although at the time I didn't know it was also the Milky Way. The tzuk [partition] head on the trunk of the tree covered their loins. The branches with their white flowers bent down along their thighs, the double-headed ecliptic snake rested in their arms, and the great bird Itzam-Yeh stood on their head. I already knew as I stood under the young tree in Tikal that the kings were the human embodiment of the ceiba as the central axis of the world. As I stood there gazing at the flowers in Joyce's hand, I also learned that the kings embodied the ceiba at the moment it flowers to yield the sak-nik-nal, the 'white flowers', that are the souls of human beings. As the trees flowers to reproduce itself, so the kings flowered to reproduce the world ...

The interior of the Australian continent was like a unusually hot and dusty high summer before the onset of the rainy season ('the tears').

... It was 4 August 1968, and it was the feast day of Saint Dominic, patron of Santo Domingo Pueblo, southwest of Santa Fe. At one end of the hot, dusty plaza, a Dominican priest watched nervously as several hundred dancers arranged in two long rows pounded the earth with their moccasined feet as a mighty, collective prayer for rain, accompanied by the powerful baritone singing of a chorus and the beat of drums. As my family and I viewed this, the largest and in some ways the most impressive Native American public ceremony, a tiny cloud over the Jémez Mountains to the northwest got larger and larger, eventually filling up the sky; at last the storm broke, and the sky was crisscrossed by lightning and the pueblo resounded with peals of rolling thunder ...

On the opposite side of the year, compared to 4 August, was February 4, when the Sun should be at the right ascension line to be sighted between the south pole star Dramasa (*320.0) and χ Capricorni


13 Mac (260)	14 Kankin (280)		15 Moan (300)
*BREAK (paxih)*

16 Pax (320)	17 Kayab	18 Cumhu	19 Vayeb (365)
... The [tun] glyph is nearly the same as that for the month Pax ... except that the top part of the latter is split or divided by two curving lines. Brinton, without referring to the Pax glyph, identified the tun glyph as the drum called in Yucatec pax che (pax 'musical instrument'; che < te 'wooden). Yucatec pax* means 'broken, disappeared', and Quiche paxih means, among other things, 'split, divide, break, separate'. It would seem that the dividing lines on the Pax glyph may have been used as a semantic/ phonetic determinative indicating that the drum should be read pax, not tun ... Thus, one may expect that this glyph was used elsewhere meaning 'to break' and possibly for 'medicine' (Yuc. pax, Tzel., Tzo. pox) ... It should be added that tun was also the period of 18 months, or 360 days ...
... The ground, the food-giving earth, was Pachamama; the moon, Paximama ... ... The tun glyph was identified as a wooden drum by Brinton ... and Marshal H. Saville immediately accepted it ... [the figure above] shows the Aztec drum representation relied on by Brinton to demonstrate his point. It was not then known that an ancestral Mayan word for drum was tun: Yucatec tunkul* 'divine drum' (?); Quiche tun 'hollow log drum'; Chorti tun 'hollow log drum' ...

There ought to be a Sleepy Character up in the top of this World Tree if it was thought of as located at a solstice. And such a dormant (→ French dormir) figure could be called a 'door-mouse' (→ at the door to a new year), in need to be invigorated, inaugurated, put into action again.

... The Mahabharata insists on six as the number of the Pleiades as well as of the mothers of Skanda and gives a very broad and wild description of the birth and the installation of Kartikeya 'by the assembled gods ... as their generalissimo', which is shattering, somehow, driving home how little one understands as yet. The least which can be said, assuredly: Mars was 'installed' during a more or less close conjunction of all planets; in Mbh. 9.45 (p. 133) it is stressed that the powerful gods assembled 'all poured water upon Skanda, even as the gods had poured water on the head of Varuna, the lord of waters, for investing him with dominion'. And this 'investiture' took place at the beginning of the Krita Yuga, the Golden Age ...

As if by chance we can easily find this character high up in the Eucalyptus tree, chewing along on its dry and poisonous leaves, requiring much processing in order to get at least some nutrition out of them. Which explains why he afterwards had to go into a deep sleep, not a full stop but like a comma.