Febr 14 (Cook → Kuu)	*28	March 14 (Caesar → Brutus)	*31	April 14
31 + 14 = 45		73		104
... The brutes of spring caused the downfall of both Captain Cook and Julius Caesar. We are close to the key myth of mankind, that which explains the regeneration of sun and of growth. Once at least some people kept the tradition living. I became interested in what really happened at March 15 and reopened Henrikson to find out. Caesar was forewarned of the threat by the prophet Spurinna, who told him that a great threat was coming at Idus Martiae or just before. The day arrived and Caesar was still living, walking to his meeting with the Senate when he happened to encounter Spurinna and told him jokingly that he was still alive. Spurinna calmely answered that the day had yet not ended. The Romans divided their months in two parts and the dividing point was Idus, which in some way was connected with the full moon. March 15 was the midpoint of March, which is close to spring equinox. The old agricultural year defined the beginning of the year to the time when sun returned, and it was connected with Mars: ... The chaotic tumult in the Curia (where the Senate had their meeting and where they killed Caesar) resulted in his dead body being left lying on the floor, while all the Senators panicked and ran out through the doors in different directions. They had planned to throw his body into the river, but the time of plans and order was in the past. Instead, in the afternoon, three of the slaves of Caesar came and fetched his body, and carried him on a stretcher to his home south of Forum - and one arm was hanging down in the corner where the 4th slave should have been ...

... The last relevant position we know of is AD 2023 April 14 (4-14,104, *24, i.e. 20 days after the Julian equinox), when Mars should be due to reach the star at the knee of the outstretched (mebsuta) leg of Castor:

ORBIT OF MARS AD 2023-2024
April 14 (180 - 76)	*16	April 30 (196 - 76)	*133	Dec 7 (*261 = 341 - 80)
Mebsuta (*100)		Pollux (*116)		ω Ophiuchi (*249)
Ga2-6 (36)		Ga2-22 (52)		Ga7-16 (185 = 265 - 80)
APRIL 26 (116)		MAY 12 (132)		SEPT 22 (EQUINOX)

*30	Jan 13 (378 = 454 - 76)		Jan 22 (463 - 76)
	Kaus Borealis (*279)		Mebsuta (*100)
	Ga8-12 (215)		Ga8-15 (36 + 182)
	OCT 22 (295)		OCT 25 (116 + 182)

... The distance from April 14 (104) AD 2023 up to and including January 22 (365 + 22 = 387) AD 2024 is 388 - 104 = 284 days which in a way suggests day *284 counted from 0h (March 21, 80) = day 364 = December 30. The 'outstretched' (Mebsuta) leg of Castor (Castor Fiber → Beaver) could evidently have served as a marker:

... Nevertheless, by virtue of a series of spectacular coincidences, Cook made a near-perfect ritual exit on the night of 3 February. The timing itself was nearly perfect, since the Makahiki rituals would end 1 February (±1 day), being the 14th day of the second Hawaiian month [Kau-lua]. This helps explain Mr. King's entry for 2 February in the published Voyage: 'Terreoboo [Kalaniopu'u] and his Chiefs, had, for some days past, been very inquisitive abouth the time of our departure' - to which his private journal adds, '& seem'd well pleas'd that it was soon'. Captain Cook, responding to Hawaiian importunities to leave behind his 'son', Mr. King, had even assured Kalaniopu'u and the high priest that he would come back again the following year. Long after they had killed him, the Hawaiians continued to believe this would happen. With the high priest's permission, the British just before leaving removed the fence and certain images of Hikiau temple for firewood. Debate raged in the nineteenth century about the role of this purported 'sacriledge' in Cook's death, without notice, however, that following Lono's sojourn the temple is normally cleared and rebuilt - indeed, the night the British left one of the temple houses was set on fire. Among the other ritual coincidences, perhaps the most remarkable was the death of poor old Willie Watman, seaman A. B., on the morning of 1 February. Watman was the first person among Cook's people to die at Kealakekua: on the ceremonial day, so far as can be calculated, that the King's living god Kahoali'i would swallow the eye of the first human sacrifice of the New Year. And it was the Hawaiian chief - or by one account, the King himself - who specifically requested that old Watman be buried at Hikiau temple. Messrs. Cook and King read the burial service, thus introducing Christianity to the Sandwich Islands, with the assistance however of the high priest Ka'oo'oo and the Lono 'brethren', who when the English had finished proceeded to make sacrifices and perform ceremonies at the grave for three days and nights. So in the early hours of 4 February, Cook sailed out of Kealakekua Bay, still alive and well. The King, too, had survived Lono's visit and incorporated its tangible benefits, such as iron adzes and daggers. In principle, the King would now make sacrifices to Kuu and reopen the agricultural shrines of Lono. The normal cosmic course would be resumed. Hence the ultimate ritual coincidence, which was meteorological: one of the fertilizing storms of winter, associated with the advent of Lono, wreaked havoc with the foremast of the Resolution, and the British were forced to return to Kealakekua for repairs on 11 February 1779 ... Mr. King remarks that there were not as many hundreds of people at their return to Kealakekua as there had been thousands when they first came in. A tabu was in effect, which was ascribed to the king's absence. By the best evidence, the British had interrupted the annual bonito-fishing rite, the transition from the Makahiki season to normal temple ceremonies. Cook was now hors cadre. And things fell apart.

Early on Sunday morning, 14 February 1779, Captain Cook went ashore with a party of marines to take the Hawaiian king, Kalaniopu'u, hostage against the return of the Discovery's cutter,

... Skanda (literally 'the jumping one' or 'the hopping one') is the planet Mars, also called Kartikeya, inasmuch as he was borne by the Krittika, the Pleiades. Mbh. 9.44-46 (Roy trans. vol. 7, pp. 130-43). It should be emphasized, aloud and strongly, that in Babylonian astronomy Mars is the only planetary representative of the Pleiades. See P. F. Gössmann. Planetarium Babylonicum (1950), p. 279: 'In der Planetenvertretung kommt für die Plejaden nur Mars in Frage.'  ... The star cluster Krittika ... sometimes known as Kārtikā, corresponds to the open star cluster Pleiades in Indian astronomy and Jyotisa (Hindu astrology). The name literally translates to 'the cutters' ... In Hindu mythology, the god Murugan (Skanda / Subrahmanya / Kartikeya) was raised by the six sisters known as the Krttikā and thus came to be known as Kārtikeya (literally 'Him of the Krttikā'). According to the Mahābhārata, Murugan was born to Agni and Svāhā, after the latter impersonated six of the seven wives of the Saptarsi and made love to him. The Saptarshi, hearing of this incident and doubting their wives' chastity, divorced them. These wives then became the Krttikā ...

... 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 ...

stolen the night before in a bold maneuver

... All was now ready for departure except that there was no fire in the smithy. The ancestor slipped into the workshop of the great Nummo, who are Heaven's smiths, and stole a piece of the sun in the form of live embers and white-hot iron. He seized it by means of a 'robber's stick' the crook of which ended in a slit, open like a mouth. He dropped some of the embers, came back to pick them up, and fled towards the granary; but his agitation was such that he could no longer find the entrances. He made the round of it several times before he found the steps and climbed onto the flat roof, where he hid the stolen goods in one of the skins of the bellows, exclaiming: 'Gouyo!', which is to say. 'Stolen!'. The word is still part of the language, and means 'granary'. It is a reminder that without the fire of the smithy and the iron of hoes there would be no crops to store ...

- of which, however, the amiable old ruler was innocent. At the decisive moment, Cook and Kalaniopu'u, the God and the King, will confront each other as cosmic adversaries. Permit me thus an anthropological reading of the historical texts. For in all the confused Tolstoian narratives of the affray - among which the judicious Beaglehole refuses to choose - the one recurrent certainty is a dramatic structure with the properties of a ritual transformation. During the passage inland to find the king, thence seaward with his royal hostage, Cook is metamorphosed from a being of veneration to an object of hostility. When he came ashore, the common people as usual dispersed before him and prostrated face to earth; but in the end he was himself precipitated face down in the water by a chief's weapon, an iron trade dagger, to be rushed upon by a mob exulting over him, and seeming to add to their own honors by the part they could claim in his death: 'snatching the daggers from each other', reads Mr. Burney's account, 'out of eagerness to have their share in killing him'. In the final ritual inversion, Cook's body would be offered in sacrifice by the Hawaiian King ...

... Cook's first visit, to Kaua'i Island in January 1778, fell within the traditional months of the New Year rite (Makahiki). He returned to the Islands late in the same year, very near the recommencement of the Makahiki ceremonies. Arriving now off northern Maui, Cook proceeded to make a grand circumnavigation of Hawai'i Island in the prescribed clockwise direction of Lono's yearly procession, to land at the temple in Kealakekua Bay where Lono begins and ends his own circuit. The British captain took his leave in early February 1779, almost precisely on the day the Makahiki ceremonies closed. But on his way out to Kahiki, the Resolution sprung a mast, and Cook committed the ritual fault of returning unexpectedly and unintelligibly. The Great Navigator was now hors catégorie, a dangerous condition as Leach and Douglas have taught us, and within a few days he was really dead - though certain priests of Lono did afterward ask when he would come back ...