Mythology and History: Chapter 4

The Secret Blackness of Milk

The Black/Baroque is existential, indifferent, feminine, material. The words material and matrix derive from the Latin mater, meaning “female” or “parent plant.” Metaphorically speaking, the Black/Baroque is water, earth, forest, tree, heavens. In a word, the Black/Baroque is the coverer. This metaphor is best understood in terms of the hierarchical levels of the universe: Earth, planets, stars. Indeed, this metaphor is the very meaning of the word understanding. If not for said hierarchical richness, the Black/Baroque would be reducible to mere Blackness. In accord with the rule that extremes meet, a merely Black existence would equate to a merely White existence. The Great Reversal is characterized by its attempt to force such reduction. Especially in the context of this Reversal, Audiberti recognized (and Sartre recalled) there is “a secret blackness of milk.” This secret is the key to mythology and in turn to history. In the present chapter we will carefully grasp this most marvelous of keys, this sword of sorts — and then we will begin to wield it.

Of course in developing my Black–White–Red, Golden/Legal theory of mythology and history, I questioned how such theory can address the religions and histories of the Jews, Christians and Muslims. How can the seemingly male-dominated Jewish religion, for instance, be said to involve worship of the Mother? I recognized that the answer, if indeed an answer was forthcoming, must have something to do with the fact that the Midianites (a.k.a. the Madianites) considered Yahweh a volcano god. Being of the Earth, indeed bleeding red earth, a volcano certainly seems female. I was at pains, however, to embellish on this connection.

And then while surfing television channels late at night I happened upon a recently produced documentary about the famous Greek temple “of Apollo” at Delphi. As you may recall, Delphi in antiquity was called the Navel of the Earth (Greek Omphalos). Generally, the omphalos, or navel-boss, was the emblem of the Mother Goddess. The ancient Greeks considered a woman’s navel the seat of her sexual passion.

Marble Hellenistic or Roman copy of Delphi’s original Omphalos.
The carved surface depicts a supposedly woolen net covering a smooth inner object.

Indeed the sacred, oracular site at Delphi was originally the precinct of Gaia and it continued to be famous for its female oracles — melissai, “bees” — who sat on tripods and thus in some sort of altered state of mind answered questions put to them, whether by statesmen, army generals, or common folk. The ancients likened the Delphi temple itself to a bee hive, saying that the initial temple there had been made of beeswax. And legend has it that the oracular conduciveness of Delphi was initially revealed by a swarm of bees. Generally the virgin priestesses of Greek goddesses such as Rhea and Demeter were called melissai; and the hierophants (from the Greek hieron, “temple”), male priests in general, were called essenes, “king bees,” a title that applied especially to the chief priest of the Eleusinian mysteries.

In regard to these “mysteries,” James George Frazer reports in his classic Golden Bough (initially published in 1890): “the names of the priests and other high officials who had to do with the performance of the Eleusinian mysteries might not be uttered in their lifetime. To pronounce them was a legal offence. … From two inscriptions found at Eleusis it appears that the names of the priests were committed to the depths of the sea ….” The Eleusinian mysteries were celebrated during the month of September. The performances represented the native union between the chief priestess and the chief priest and likewise the union of the “corn-goddess” Demeter and “sky-god” Zeus (whom we’ve identified as the complex, Red/Dionysian Dyeus, Celtic Father Dis, god of the underworld). Frazer:

The torches having been extinguished, the pair [chief priestess and chief priest, queen bee and king bee] descended into a murky place, while the throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress, on which they believed their own salvation depended. After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of light silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the fruit of the divine marriage. Then in a loud voice he proclaimed, “Queen Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos,” by which he meant, “The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty.” The corn-mother in fact had given birth to her child, the corn, and her travail-pangs were enacted in the sacred drama.

Delphi is thus deeply related to Eleusis (which name means “advent, rebirth”) in terms of bees. And Eleusis points — in terms of the unity between female and male — through the agri-culture of the Great Reversal to a time when Zeus was recognized as existing within the Mother. There is this deep Black/Baroqueness to White Apollo’s Delphi.

Legend has it that Apollo killed the serpent that originally occupied Delphi. That serpent is variously named Tityos, Typhon and Python and is said to be the son of Gaia and to have 100 heads. Here again, in terms of this serpent, we seem to have Dyeus, Father Dis, Zeus. The Greeks considered this serpent equivalent to Egypt’s ass-eared Set, the supposedly evil elder brother of Osiris. Asses were sacred to Dionysus. Jesus of Nazareth, recall, poignantly manifested an ancient prophecy by riding into Jerusalem on an ass. Robert Graves, from his Greek Myths:

A pair of ass ear’s at the tip of a reed sceptre was the token of royalty carried by all Egyptian dynastic gods, in memory of the time when ass-eared Set ruled their pantheon. Set had greatly declined in power …. Set had previously ruled the second half of the year, and annually murdered his brother Osiris, the spirit of the first half, whose emblem was a bull: they were, in fact, the familiar rival twins perpetually contending for the favours of their sister, the Moon-goddess Isis.

Now, according to said television documentary, scholars recently discovered that the temple at Delphi is built directly over the nexus of 2 ancient and roughly orthogonal fault lines. This nexus was once occupied by spring water that bubbled with the anesthetic gas ethylene. It was this gas, the scientists say (and they do so in accord with ancient accounts), that induced the altered state in which an oracle would pronounce. On this geological view, Delphi is strikingly analogous to a volcano. And so I asked myself: Could the Mother goddess who is implicitly below Delphi — or, more precisely, the mysterious union down there between the Mother and the god of the underworld — be equivalent to the original Yahweh?

The name Yahweh (YHVH, Yahveh, Yivah) corresponds to the Sanskrit Jivah (Yava, Java), meaning “female tongue,” “fire,” “life.” The Latin viva is a cognate. Likewise in Sanskrit Ge (as in geo, gene, and Gaia) means “to live.” In Hebrew Yah means “existent.” In German the ge- prefix signifies commonality, collectiveness, and plurality. The simplest cognate prefixes are: Ja-, Jo- and Je-, as in Jacob, Janus, Jason, James, Jesus, Joshua, Johan, John, Joan, Joanna; I-, as in Isaac, Isis, Isabelle, and Ian; and Se-, as in Sean, Set and serpent. The serpent represents the aboriginal offspring of Gaia–Ouranos, i.e. of the supposedly original Mother–Father. Gaia, however, is both mother and wife of Ouranos, for the Father is fundamentally contained in the Mother. Which is to say, the notion of creation is but metaphorical; the Black/Baroque is best considered merely existent, not created. Gaia’s other primal offspring, so to speak, are the Mountains and Pontus (a.k.a. Proteus the sea god, “first man”; Poseidon, Neptune).

In Greek lore Gaia, Ouranos and their kin antedate the “Gods” and are called the Titans. The serpent Tityos at Delphi symbolizes the Titans, which group, according to my understanding, corresponds to the Black/Baroque, the real matrix, the plenum, the infinite set of monads (souls), a multeity-in-unity. The snake lends itself as the chief symbol of this set. The set’s fundamental nature is represented by the lowness of the snake. The set’s plurality is represented by the snake’s myriad scales. The set’s baroqueness, by the coiling of the snake’s body. Moreover the (cyclically) temporal aspect of existence is represented by said coiling and especially by the famous molting of the snake’s skin. Meanwhile the set’s unity is represented by the simple, linear and finite singularity of the snake’s body. Hence the snake, the serpent, is especially associated with the altar, the omphalos, and the World Tree that springs therefrom, i.e. with the place of unity, or, more precisely, of multeity-in-unity.

The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together for me. Tityos the serpent of Delphi represents the Black/Baroque, the (metaphorical) Mother. Yahweh represents this Mother. The serpent is a symbol of Yahweh.

Several months after I viewed the aforementioned documentary I learned that James Joyce had cultivated a thesis, which he gleaned in large part from the famously anti-Semitic Jew Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, that the Jews are by nature womanly men — “a phrase,” notes Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, “which, incidentally, is applied to [the Jewish] Bloom in Ulysses.” Leopold Bloom is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE, i.e. Here Comes Everybody) is Father Dis is Neptune is Yahweh is Everyman is Everywoman. We are all unique but related serpents of sorts, phoenixes.

The suffix -weh (or -VH, -veh, -vah) in the name Yahweh signifies the serpent-like, phoenix-like nature of all existence. This suffix is related to the Latin vertere and to the Anglo Saxon wicce, which mean “turning” or “dancing.” Hence we have the Latin term vice versa and the English words vertex, vortex, verge, verve, verb, and, importantly, vernal. Moreover we get the Norse vik (referring to the changing tide in a fjord) and the German wid and wit as well as the English video, vital, widow, wit, wise, wizard, wicked, wicca-craft (i.e. witchcraft), wicker, willow, weak, week (Spanish semana), and cricket’s wicket. Likewise there is the Sanskrit vid, meaning “to separate,” and veda, meaning “knowledge.” Hence, too, we have the name David, the planet Venus (both “morning star” and “evening star”), and the star Vega (the “Witch Star,” attending the Hercules constellation). Furthermore there is the Norse Vigrid Plain — site of Ragnarök and equivalent to the Semitic Megiddo, as in Har Megiddo, a.k.a. Armageddon, from the Hebrew gdd or gadad, “to cut” or “to troop.” The root vi/ve also features in the name of Vishnu, Red/Dionysian preserver god of the Indian pantheon. Vishnu corresponds to the Norse Loki and to the Egyptian Upuat.

Simply put, the name Yahweh means “the set of phoenixes,” i.e. the set of monads, the Black/Baroque.

A brief lesson is now called for regarding what is conventionally termed the precession of the Earth’s axis of rotation relative to the background stars (i.e. relative to the fixed stars, the firmament). This so-called precession is the basis of the precession of the equinoxes. The current lesson, however, is told from the prehistoric, proto-mythological perspective, and as such it has abandoned talk of precession and of the Earth’s axis of rotation. In abandoning these modern concepts especially, we largely enter the consciousness of prehistoric humanity and thus literally see the otherwise secret key to mythology and history.

Gravity is such that the fixed stars each night rotate as if they are a single extremely large spherical constellation with the Earth at its center. In other words, this rotation occurs relative to a pair of opposed and otherwise invisible points among this essentially universal constellation. These points are the basis of what we call “north” and what we call “south.” The upper half of the rotation about the “northern” point proceeds from White/right to Red/left (relative to an [Earthly] observer directing his or her gaze upon this point). The upper half of the rotation about the “southern” point, on the other hand, proceeds from Red/left to White/right (again, relative to an observer directing his or her gaze upon this point). The Earth’s equator is the line on the Earth’s surface where these 2 opposite points are both on the horizon. As a person travels north of this line, said northerly point rises higher above the horizon while said southerly point drops lower below the horizon, and vice versa.

Strangely, however, each of these points also changes independently of an observer’s position on Earth. Which is to say, each of the pair of points moves relative to the fixed stars. Such movement is essentially universal, invariant. (This is the same kind of invariance that is famously at bottom of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity.) The direction of the northerly point’s invariant movement is the same as the direction of the universe’s nightly rotation about that point: White/right to Red/left. Likewise the direction of the southerly point’s invariant movement is the same as the direction of the universe’s nightly rotation about that point: Red/left to White/right. These changes are extremely slow, however, for each occurs within its own series of ellipses, each ellipse having a period of what is best considered to be either 25,920 years or 26,352 years. Nevertheless, each of these 2 points is the “hand” of a universal clock. Not only does this universal clock have 2 hands, and not only do these 2 hands move in perfectly contrary directions; the face of this clock is extremely complex, consisting of all the stars and sub-constellations thereof.

This universal clock is naturally simplified, however, in the sense that anywhere away from the equator only 1 of its clock hands is visible. And it can be further simplified insofar as an observer considers only those sub-constellations nearby that visible hand. In this sense the northern face of the universal clock has 6 hours, for the northern hand passes just inside 6 sub-constellations during its long cycle: Cepheus, Cygnus, Lyra, Hercules, Bootes, and Ursa Major. A 7^th such constellation is located just inside and tangent to the ellipse described by said hand/point: the adze-like Ursa Minor, the tip of which coincides with said ellipse.

Centered upon the northern face of the universal clock is the constellation Draco, the sea–serpent. In this regard Draco is best considered the chief constellation of this face, symbolic of the whole face and moreover of the entire universe. Ursa Minor ranks 2^nd in this respect, Cepheus, 3^rd, Cygnus 4^th, Lyra 5^th, Hercules 6^th, Bootes 7^th, and Ursa Major 8^th. Here, altogether, is nothing less than a picture — literally a photograph — of Jahweh.

In other words, the universal clock is a photograph of the hero in general, i.e. of the singular, cyclic, heroic journey. I’m reminded of the following from Hart Crane’s Bridge: “Stars scribble in our eyes the frosty sagas/The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space.” The clock is extrinsic, universal structure, but it generally and perfectly matches intrinsic, monadic structure. Which is to say, universal structure in general — celestial, planetary, and Earthly — evidences the fact that reality consists of a multeity of monads nevertheless in unity. The whole universe is a clock. And the meaning of the universe — the meaning of time, of existence — is that you are not alone. Put metaphorically, the universe is a cup that contains all souls. This is the sense in which the universal clock is the prehistoric/antique Holy Grail.

Northern Face of the Universal Clock

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The celestial aspect of the universal clock is the chief characteristic of the Black/Baroque — i.e. of the cosmos, of reality, of the set of monads. And thus this aspect of the clock is key to the essentially quantum mathematics that is part and parcel of the Golden/Legal philosophy. According to that quantum philosophy, the modern, geometric, spatial model of the universe is false. There is no essentially unlimited configuration space. There is no set of Riemannian-like spaces. There is no sense to the notion that countless, life-bearing planets like Earth exist simultaneously (regardless of whether their life is “intelligent”). Earth, you might say, is the center of the universe. Existence in general expresses itself in terms of this confused center. Distance is hierarchical. And what’s more, distance is not extension but rather the structure of immediacy, which immediacy is, according to the principle of relativity, a medium. In this sense the supposedly distant is precisely inchoate. Yes, you are probably hearing it here for the first time: Space does not really exist! Space, indeed, has never happened to you. You have never been in space. Space — as a mere yet almost extremely useful concept — has been in you. Everything that has happened to you has been absolutely immediate to you. This fact goes for the Apollo astronauts as well. The Moon exists, but only in terms of (immediate) experience. The exploration of the universe requires the abandonment of space. The universe will be explored on the basis of a physical theory according to which space does not exist. The concept of space is very useful, yes, but not extremely useful.
Earth the center of a hierarchical universe? An antiquated notion, to be sure! But it matches fact and principle far better than does the modern, geometric model of the universe. Yes, that’s correct. Take the hydrogen atom especially. The hydrogen atom is hierarchical. Orthodox physics describes all matter in terms of the hydrogen atom. And physics is destined to describe the hydrogen atom and space — and light (i.e. radiation) too — as being the same stuff.
Consider in this literal light the following from Benet of Canfield: “I say, then, that introversion must be rejected, because extraversion must never be admitted; but one must live continuously in the abyss of the divine Essence and in the nothingness of things; and if at times a man finds himself separated from them … he must return to them, not by introversion, but by annihilation.”
Increasingly since the inception of the Great Reversal, virtually all of us have been plugged in, as it were, to the geometric model of the universe. I’m going to indicate how you can unplug yourself, how you can recognize the universe and the matrix (reality) for what it is. In the process you will recognize that the famous “spookiness” of orthodox quantum theory is a drop in the bucket compared to the universal and real spookiness.
Let’s move forward in this extreme respect via an explication of the northern and southern faces of the universal clock. As I noted, all the movement associated with the northern hand of the universal clock is from right to left, from physically powerful to physically weak, i.e. from White to Red; while all the movement associated with the southern hand is from left to right, from physically weak to physically powerful, from Red to White. According to proto-mythology, the Red/Dionysian, despite being physically weak relative to the White/Apollonian (as the left hand tends to be weak relative to the right), dominates the White/Apollonian: somehow or another, whether by the high priest or by the universe at large (i.e. by time itself), the king is sacrificed, rendering him Red/Dionysian. In this respect the northern face of the universal clock is the proto-mythological face, the face of destiny; it dominates the southern face as the high priest dominates the king; as the pen is mightier than the sword; as taxes, age and death are ineluctable.
This is why almost all clocks move in the “clockwise” direction, the Red-to-White direction, the provisional direction, the direction of the Great Reversal and of all such reversals. The “counter-clockwise” direction is the proto-mythological, White-to-Red direction, the direction of destiny, the direction of wisdom.
It follows that the high tide of destiny corresponds to the time when the northern face of the universal clock is closest to the northern horizon, i.e. farthest from the south and thus furthest from the White/Apollonian. At that time the hand of that northern face coincides with the aforementioned tip of Ursa Minor. In this sense, Ursa Minor — and its “fox star,” Polaris — is the stellar equivalent of a proto-mythological guide, a high priest, a “king bee” (Greek essene). The Egyptians called this guide Upuat, Opener of the Way. The adze which the Egyptians used in their famous Opening of the Mouth ceremony, which ceremony they performed upon the body of the recently dead Pharaoh, corresponds precisely to the Ursa Minor constellation.
As far as I know, modern scholars have failed to recognize in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony a re-enactment of the cutting down (sacrifice) of a great tree. My brother is a firefighter and has moreover been professionally trained to manage wildfires. That training involves instruction in the art of the sawyer. The sawyer begins to fell a large tree by cutting (with saw, axe or adze) a “bird’s mouth” wedge into a side of the tree. That wedge should terminate about 3/7 of the way into the tree. The sawyer then steps to the opposite side and makes a more acute “kerf” cut the same distance inward, thus leaving the tree’s middle 1/7 or so as “holding wood.” Next the sawyer inserts a wedge into the kerf cut and “opens that mouth” until the holding wood begins to make a cracking sound. Upon hearing that sound the sawyer knows the tree is about to come down. He or she drops the cutting device and runs away from the tree (perhaps yelling “Timber!”) via a predetermined route, The saw (adze, axe) corresponds to Ursa Minor, the wedge that opens the kerf (i.e. mouth) corresponds to Cepheus, and the holding wood corresponds to the duration between Polaris and Cepheus, i.e. the quantum moment/season/age of existence/sacrifice.
Tom Sawyer, you see, is Upuat. Huck Finn and Jim are the Pharaoh, the Phoenix, the World Tree. The Mississippi is the river of death, of descent, of bondage. And the Ohio is the river of life, of ascent, of freedom. By the way, Samuel Clemens’ penname Mark Twain means “2 fathoms.”
Southern Face of the Universal Clock

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Note regarding Argo Navis: Carina is “the keel,”
Vela is “the sail,” and Puppis is “the poop (deck).”

At the high tide of the universal clock the southern constellation Columba, the white dove, is farthest from the clock’s southern hand. Columba is equivalent to the Serpent, the Phoenix. At the low tide of the clock, which corresponds to the northern constellation Hercules, the southern hand coincides with the southern tip of Columba. Which is to say, Columba is not only equivalent to Hercules but is also the White/Apollonian counterpart of Ursa Minor, Upuat.
Hence in Apollonius’s Argonautica, the aged and blind sire Phineus (son of Agenor) — i.e. Phoenix, Finneus — prophecies during the great feast in his honor that Jason and the Argonauts must attempt with the aid of a female dove (or heron or crane) passage through the twin Cynaen (“Blue”) rocks, which rocks are famous for inveterately slamming together to crush any living creature who dares travel between. Of course the prophecy comes true: “and then Euphemus grasped the dove in his hand and started to mount the prow; and they, at the bidding of Tiphys, son of Hagnias, rowed with good will to drive Argo between the rocks, trusting to their strength.” Released, the dove speeds between the rocks so fast that they fail to harm it. Hence the rocks return to their separate stations for the last time, absent forever their previous mobility. Athena meanwhile facilitates the Argo’s passage through the agitated neck of water. Said twin rocks are otherwise known as the Planctae or Symplegades, the latter meaning “Simple Gate,” the word simple deriving from the Latin sem or sim, importantly meaning “1,” and plus or plex, meaning “multiplied by”; to this day they mark the transition between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the so-called Bosporus, which also marks the transition from Asia to Europe. As we will see, these rocks correspond to the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. most generally, to the legs of the constellation Hercules. Interestingly, Robert Graves notes: “Sir Isaac Newton was the first, so far as I know, to point out the connexion between the Zodiac and the Argo’s voyage.”
The Zodiac, I should point out, accounts for the movement of the universal clock in terms of the rising and setting of the Sun at the equinoxes and solstices. This accounting is White/Apollonian in contrast to the accounting based directly on the northern face of the universal clock. The White/Apollonian nature of the Zodiac is emphasized by the convention by which the Zodiacal age is assigned according to the constellation that rises in approximate conjunction with the Sun on the so-called spring (i.e. “vernal”) equinox, when the Sun is directly over the equator (and thus when daytime is almost exactly equal to nighttime: day equals night, Latin equi nox). Therefore we have the phrase “precession of the equinoxes.” Of course all the Zodiacal constellations are approximately in the “plane of the ecliptic,” i.e. the plane of the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. The orbital plane of each planet in our solar system, although naturally unique to that planet, is nearly coincident with the Earth’s; this is why the path of each of these planets as seen from the Earth is nearly identical to the path of the Sun as seen from Earth. Insofar as a Zodiacal constellation rises in conjunction with the Sun, the constellation is not visible. However, by noticing which constellations have risen in the east over the course of the night, and by checking a general star chart of sorts, an observer can determine which constellation actually rises in conjunction with the Sun.
Precisely inasmuch as a stellar constellation is immediate to or otherwise associated with a face of the universal clock, the constellation is proto-mythological. This understanding can hardly be overestimated in our effort to understand mythology, yet it has gone almost entirely unrecognized or unremarked by the authorities on mythology, all of whom have labored under the spell of the Great Reversal. James Joyce is perhaps the only exception. In fact, you now possess the master key to his Finnegans Wake. Joyce, as we will learn, considered himself equivalent to Ursa Minor, to Upuat (Opener of the Way), to the high priest, and, contrariwise, to Columba.
“As often as I think of that unbloody housewarmer,” exclaims Joyce’s (White/Apollonian) Shaun in the Wake, “Shem Skrivenitch, always cutting my phrose to please his phrase … He was grey at three, like sygnus the swan, when he made his boo to the public and barnacled up to the eyes when he repented after seven.” That “three” is a reference to the constellation Cygnus and to the beginning of the Zodiacal age of Libra, precisely 3 such ages from the end of the Zodiacal age of Aquarius; likewise it references the constellation Bootes and the Zodiacal age of Gemini, precisely 3 such ages beyond the age of Libra. “Boo,” of course, is Bootes. The phrase “repented after seven” means 5 + 7 = 12 and indicates the full circle back to Libra, which is separated from Gemini by 7 Zodiacal ages. The word “barnacled” refers to Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle; and “up to the eyes” refers to the blind Orion walking through the sea á la Poseidon/Neptune. (Joyce himself suffered terrible problems with his eyesight.) Orion as such is equivalent to Zeus in the form of a swan, i.e. Cygnus.
“Upu now!” replies Shem to Shaun a page later.
The preceding diagram of the northern face of the universal clock relates the clock’s correspondence to the 12 or 14 Titans of Greek mythology, the sons and daughters of Gaia and Ouranos. Each of the daughters is associated with a son, the 6 or 7 resulting combinations being unique, dual, proto-mythological units. The river Oceanus flows from the primal spring Pontus on the side of the Mountain(s) down to Tethys–Oceanus (Hercules). Carried along on — and rather equivalent to — this current is the (sea–)serpent Draco. Note in this respect that although water is a dominantly feminine category, rivers and currents — serpents/phoenixes of sorts — are masculine relative to springs, ponds (from the Middle English poundes, meaning “enclosure”), lakes, swamps, seas and oceans.
The point where the northern hand of the universal clock coincides with the tip of Cepheus is another important point on the universal clock. This point marks the termination of the proto-mythological season of sacrifice, of the moment/age of se, of separation, of multeity-in-unity. The beginning of this duration — the most important point on the whole clock — is marked by the tip of Ursa Minor. At said end of this duration the king/hero enters the tomb, i.e. the night, the house, the ark, etc. In this sense he enters Cepheus, becomes Cepheus, becomes the World Tree, dominantly Red/Dionysian and clearly Black/Baroque, representing the entire set of monads, of heroes.
This duration — in all its fractal ramifications — is the crux of existence, the heart of every moment. Cepheus sits atop (or hangs upon) the World Tree, which tree is rooted in the Pegasus Square (a.k.a. the Great Square). From Cepheus’s head, as it were, the World Tree aborts into a huge canopy — the Milky Way — that arcs down to each horizon. Said duration corresponds to the supposed instant of supposed original creation, original severing, original Fall, when Kronos, youngest of the Titan brood, grabbed with his left hand his “father” Ouranos’s genitals and with the flint sickle in his right hand cut them off, thus, you might say, started time — precisely as the P-I-E Manu dismembered Yemo (and the equivalent ox).
Cepheus is the Green Man, the Wild Man, the Sylvester/Sylvanus, the Iron John, of European myth.

The Green Man of Bamberg, a corbel to the foliated ledge supporting the famous
Rider of Bamberg (c. 1239 CE). Note the castle in the air. (Photo at left © Clive Hicks:
www.clivehicks.co.uk. See the book Green Man, by Anderson and Hicks.)

In terms of the Zodiac, the moment of sacrifice is the 7^th (seventh) age, the age of Aquarius “the water gatherer.” This age corresponds to the 7^th month of the modern calendar, the month of September. More importantly it corresponds to the proto-mythological New Year. Recall that the Latin sem means “1.” Here is the very name Shem; it means multeity-in-unity, severing, separation, transition, creation, beginning, ending, moment, crux, existence. This indeed is why the number 7 is named “seven.”
Every moment at every scale is a beginning and an ending, a moment of sacrifice, a Zenith and a Fall; every moment is quantum-gravitational, a crux, a cross, a multeity-in-unity — essentially, extremely beautiful. This is the complex, fractal nature of quantum gravity, of existence in general. Consider in this respect the following from Robert Musil:
Le Sacre du printemps: a ballet that ends with the sacrifice of a young girl, who must die for springtime to return. … Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give the barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty — there’s the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. … [I]f it were denounced — stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness — it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of “propaganda.” It is because it is beautiful that the girl’s murder is so horrible.
This is not to say that human sacrifice should actually be practiced in our contemporary culture. Indeed, such practice would be — and in fact is — all too ugly. The Golden/Legal philosophy accommodates and precisely inasmuch requires the modulation of such practice. The Golden/Legal is more than proto-mythological.
The universal aspect of the Black/Baroque consists of a celestial component, a planetary component, and an Earthly component. These 3 components are a multeity-in-unity. As such, the spatial structures and temporal cycles evident within each such component should mathematically — i.e. quantumly — resonate with those evident within the other such components. Most importantly the aforenoted 25,920-year or 26,352-year cycle of the universal clock and consequently of the Zodiac should correspond in this sense to the seeming 365 days or 366 days of the Sun’s cycle relative to the Earth. (Pre-historic and ancient proto-mythologists of course considered the Sun a planet circling the Earth.)
Prime Celestial and Planetary Components of the Universal Clock
21 September 2070 CE

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This is the sense in which the number 5 enters the picture. The organic structures present on Earth tend to evidence a remarkable 5-fold symmetry. The animal body, for instance, tends to consists of 2 rear limbs + 2 front limbs + 1 head = 5 major parts. Moreover, the terminus of each such limb tends to be graced by 5 digits. There are also the 5 senses. And so on. Now, 365 - 5 = 360, and 25,920 / 360 = 72. Likewise, 26,352 / 366 = 72. Thus if a universal clock face is conceptually divided into either 360 or 366 equal wedges, the clock will complete 1 such tick every 72 years, which is approximately the maximum human lifespan.
The modern measurements of the precession of the Earth’s axis give a figure of 25,776 years. Therefore the single-degree precessional figure is 71.6 years. However, the proto-mythologists would have gained virtually nothing and lost almost everything if they chose to code 71.6 rather than 72 into proto-mythology. They expected quantum mathematics, and that’s what they believed they discovered. This is actually proper procedure for a theoretical scientist. Recall Einstein: “It is theory which first determines what can be observed.” Principle should be the last thing abandoned; empirical inconsistencies — especially slight ones — relative to the corollaries of principle should be doggedly considered consequent of experimental flaw, whether that flaw be materially accidental or conceptually accidental (i.e. corollary of a different theory, which theory is nevertheless a basis of the design or interpretation of the experiment testing the theory in question). This conservation of principle should indeed be radical, although it likewise implies a radical critique of the principle or principles involved, which critique will tend to modify principles.
The “discovery” of the relations between 25,920 and 365 and between 26,352 and 366 is at bottom of the system according to which there are 5 holy days (“holidays”) plus 360 normal days. Here we have the Golden/Legal basis of Mesopotamia’s famous “sexagesimal” numbering system — i.e. the quasi base-60 system — which is still with us today in terms of 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 360 degrees, and so on. The word sexagesimal — indicating base-60 — as applied here is slightly misleading; for only 2 symbols (not 60 symbols) are used to represent the numbers from 1 through 60, these symbols being and . (Unless I note otherwise, the numbers presented in this volume are of course base-10 numbers.) The initial symbol serves for both 1 and 60; the other serves for 10. The number 7, for instance, is written ; the number 12 is written ; the number 74 is written ; the number 100 is written ; the number 2159 is written (where the is in the 10³ place, the is in the 10² place, the is in the 10¹ place, and the is in the 10⁰ place); and the number 2160 is written simply (where is in the 10³ place, is in the 10² place, is in the 10¹ place, and the 10⁰ place is either left obviously blank or left to be inferred from the particular context).
Note that the sexagesimal symbols for the numbers 9 — — and 4 are the only such symbols that are perfectly square — á la the Pegasus Square. Note, too, that 9 x 40 = 360.
Let’s now direct our focus to the middle component of the universe: the planets, the planasthai as the Greeks called them, the “wanderers.” The planets — which category importantly includes comets and meteors — wander relative to the fixed stars. The 7 obvious primary planasthai, which group includes of course the Sun and the Moon, were recognized by proto-mythologists as not only orbiting the Earth but also — due to the remarkable variance in their brightness over the months and years — as wandering by turns farther from and nearer to the Earth, such variance being especially noticeable of Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
The Sun — chief among the planets — was considered feminine. The planets were referred to as her “dogs”; the “the dogs of Persephone,” Pythagoras called them, implying Red/Dionysian Aphrodite along with Red/Dionysian Persephone. The fixed stars and each of the 7 primary planets rose and fell each day just like the kingly Phoenix. But the Moon — which furthermore waxes and wanes — is extremely Phoenix-like and is in this sense masculine relative to the Sun. Indeed, Sonne in German is a female word whereas Mond, “Moon,” is masculine. Likewise in Japanese the Sun is feminine and the Moon masculine. “There is, in fact,” writes Joseph Campbell, “a great mythological area east of the Rhine, where the myth of the moon brother and sun sister is told.” Essentially referring to the Great Reversal, Campbell emphasizes: “The new age of the Sun God has dawned, and there is to follow an extremely interesting, mythologically confusing development (known as solarization), whereby the entire symbolic system of the earlier age is to be reversed, with the moon and the lunar bull assigned to the mythic sphere of the female, and the lion, the solar principle, to the male.”
In the largely proto-mythological courts of Sumer the following planetary correspondences were recognized and honored: the king corresponded to the Moon (Dummuzi, Tammuz, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, etc., Joyce’s White/Apollonian Shaun and ultimately Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker), the queen corresponded to the Sun (Inanna/Antu, Ishtar, Isis, Astarte/Cybele, Aphrodite/Persephone, Demeter, etc., Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle); meanwhile the virgin maiden who accompanied the king in death (to be his bride upon his resurrection, of sorts) corresponded to the planet Venus (Inanna, as both “evening star” and “morning star,” goddess of the underworld and goddess of the overworld, Aphrodite/Persephone and Athena, goddess of love and goddess of war, Red/Dionysian and White/Apollonian, Plurabelle and Livia and altogether Anna, i.e. the Sun, Everywoman, the Green Woman; Joyce’s Isabelle); and finally the 4 chief ministers of state — lord of the treasury, lord of war, lord executioner, and prime minister — corresponded to the planets Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, respectively (Joyce’s Red/Dionysian Shem and, latterly, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker). In terms of these last 4 planets we have the 4 aspects of the Red/Dionysian type: messenger, god of war (i.e. sacrificed warrior in contrast to active warrior), high priest, and sacrificed king (Father Dis, and all ancestors and descendents; corresponding to the Sun, Anna Livia Plurabelle).
The dashing, pure, sophomoric, provisional, White/Apollonian aspect of the male is represented by the silver/white crescent Moon. This aspect culminates in the king at the moment of sacrifice — i.e. in the full Moon, and especially the “Harvest Moon” when in the autumn the full Moon rises in synch with but opposite to the setting Sun and therefore appears both large and orange (owing respectively to its close visual proximity to the familiar objects of the horizon and to the extremely unusual path by which its light reaches the viewer). As we will learn, the color orange is proto-mythologically significant of the season of sacrifice. The king/Moon at the moment of being sacrificed is united with all the other planets — especially with the Sun, the apparent disc of which, by a quantum coincidence, occupies exactly the same area of visual space as does the full Moon, hence the transit of the Moon across the Sun can result in a total eclipse of the Sun. (The apparent mean diameter of the Sun is 32 minutes 2 seconds of arc, while that of the Moon is 31 minutes 37 seconds. Later I will explain that the number 32 is richly related to the precise moment of falling, i.e. to the tip of the pyramid. ... A similar and related quantumness is the fact that the Moon always shows virtually the same face to the Earth, the rotations of the 2 bodies being in synch.) Now you see the tremendous importance that the proto-mythological consciousness attached (and attaches) to such eclipse. Joseph Campbell, from his Occidental Mythology:
A fundamental idea of all pagan religious disciplines, both of the Orient and the Occident [during the period of the 1^st millennium BCE] was that the inward turning of the mind (symbolized by sunset) should culminate in a realization of an identity in esse of the individual (microcosm) and the universe (macrocosm), which, when achieved, would bring together in one order of act and realization the principles of eternity and time, sun and moon, male and female, Hermes and Aphrodite (Hermaphroditus), and the two serpents of the caduceus.
The image of the “Meeting of sun and moon” is everywhere symbolic of this instant, and the only unsolved questions in relation to its universality are: a) how far back it goes, b) where it first arose, and c) whether from the start it was read both psychologically and cosmologically.
Thus far we have recognized the following set of “prime” proto-mythological numbers: 3 (levels of the universe), 25,920, 26,352, 6, 7 (the primary planets, and Ursa Minor), 8 (Draco), 9 and 4 (perfect cubes per the sexagesimal numbering system; akin to the Pegasus Square), 40 (because 9 x 40 = 360), 365, 5, 360, 60 (360 / 6), 366, and 72. According to proto-mythology, the movements of the planets should correspond in quantum fashion to this set of numbers. As I will explain much later on, the planets do not disappoint in this respect. In fact, they amaze!
From the set of primary proto-mythological (Red/Dionysian) numbers we can derive a strictly secondary (White/Apollonian) set which should correspond to the stellar constellations significantly apart from the northern face of the universal clock. It is only in this secondary sense that the 12 constellations of the Zodiac — as well as the set consisting of 12 first-magnitude stars, i.e. those stars bright enough to be visible upon their rising or setting — are to be considered fundamental. Likewise the number 30 is only secondarily fundamental, for 12 x 30 = 360. This recognition indicates that the proto-mythological month consists not of 30 days but of 40 days; likewise the proto-mythological year consists not of 12 months but of 9 months. I will confirm this hunch as we progress through this volume.
Inasmuch as the rising of the Sun in the springtime and hence 12-ness and 30-ness and clockwise directionality are primary, we have a clear mythological expression of White/Apollonian reversal and especially of the Great Reversal. These markers signify the discrediting of sacrifice, the elevation of the provisional over the principled, the warrior over the priest/poet, the continuum over the quantum, White over Red, ideal over real, male over female.
The legend of how the twins Remus and Romulus founded Rome recalls such reversal, especially the Great Reversal. When Remus (equivalent to Joyce’s Shem) and Romulus (Joyce’s Shaun) quarrelled regarding where their new city should stand, they agreed to settle the dispute by divination. But when during this process Remus saw 6 vultures and Romulus 12, the twins came to blows and Romulus killed Remus.
Note the 12-ness now ramifying in our world. We have 12 hours on the clock face, 12 months, 12 inches in a foot, 12 jurors, 12 eggs in a carton, 12 tribes of Israel, and 12 apostles. King Arthur’s famous round table was attended by precisely 12 knights (the perilous empty 13^th seat was eventually occupied by Galahad, he who could see the Grail distinctly), and Arthur’s last and greatest battle was his 12^th. The Egyptian physiological system is based on the number 12: “These canals, by cosmic flux and reflux, conduct the red and white solar energy to the areas where the 12 powers lie sleeping within the organs of the body. Once, every two hours of the night and day, each is activated by the passage of Ra, the Sun of the blood, and then it returns to sleep.” Chinese acupuncture is based upon 12 supposed meridians of the body; and every 12 hours a single meridian reaches peak activity. Buddhism’s karmic chain or wheel of life consists of precisely 12 links.
But let’s recommence our survey of the proto-mythological number 5, which number we haven’t paid its due. Horus — dominately White/Apollonian hero figure of Egypt, and the equivalent of Hamlet — is the 5^th son of the greatest god Ra, according to the Egyptian Heliopolitan (a.k.a. Onian) theology. The progression in that theology is Ra to Shu to Geb/Seb/Keb to Osiris to Horus. Ancient architects of the Middle East, Central America and North America symbolized the cosmic primacy of 5-ness using the 5 points of the sacred ziggurat or pyramid. Such structures are akin to the begging bowl of the Buddha, in which 4 bowls from the 4 quarters are united, this unity being the 5^th aspect of the set and akin to the apex (ben, “head”) of a pyramid. There are also the 5 “aggregates” or skandha of Buddhism, these being 5 categories in which the sense of self is ensconced: physical forms, feelings/sensations, perceptions, habits, and consciousness. The Chinese elements are 5-fold: wood, fire, earth, metal, water. And the Chinese calendar recognizes 5 seasons. Moreover, the Chinese musical scale consists of 5 notes. There are 5 Pillars of Islam, i.e. 5 Pillars of “Submission (to Allah),” of “peace”: acknowledgement of Allah (Shahadah); ritual prayers (Salat or Namaaz); paying of ritual alms (Zakat or Zakah); fasting (Saum or Siyam) during Ramadan, i.e. during the 9^th month of the Islamic (lunar) calendar; and pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj). Muslims — i.e. Submitters (to Allah) — are moreover instructed to pray to Allah 5 times every 24 hours. The number 5 also represents the 4 Greek elements (earth, air, fire, and water) plus the force supposedly unifying them. Homer refers to the “rosy-fingered dawn” precisely 5 times in the Iliad.
In the United States of America the telephone number 555 1212 is generally the number to call if you need to find another telephone number. Red/Dionysian coupled to White/Apollonian.
I should add that the perfect “Pythagorean” or “Platonic” solids are 5 in number: the tetrahedron (pyramid) bounded by 4 equilateral triangles; the cube; the octahedron (8 equilateral triangles); the dodecahedron (12 pentagons); and the icosahedron (20 equilateral triangles). Each of these solids, being perfectly symmetric, can be inscribed into a sphere such that every vertex of the solid lies on the surface of the sphere; likewise each can contain a sphere such that the sphere is tangent to every surface. No other perfectly symmetrical, 3-dimensional solid satisfies these criteria. Plato considered these solids the smallest 3-dimensional constituents of perceptible things. He further recognized, however, that these elemental solids are not the ultimate elements. Rather the perfect solids consist of their faces, which are regular, 2-dimensional polygons consisting of triangles whose sides are related to each other in extremely beautiful ratios. Plato even allowed that the triangles can dissociate and recombine in new ways. Said mere yet beautiful ratios are therefore the true elements according to Plato. As Plato may have known, the function Phi (i.e. the Golden Mean of the Fibonacci series), the function Pi, and the square root functions of the numbers 2, 3, and 5 are altogether sufficient to form the perfect solids and to define and describe all possible harmonic combinations of numbers (i.e. ratios, quanta). “All is number,” asserted the Pythagoreans famously and in perfect accord with the Golden/Legal philosophy. In other words, the essence of reality is quantum, rational.
At this point in our discussion I cannot resist presenting a particular further commentary about the aforementioned Fibonacci series. Every 5th number — and only every 5^th number — of the Fibonacci series is a multiple of 5. In fact this is the most obvious symmetry in the series. Renowned British mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, now of Oxford University, has developed an aperiodic 2-dimensional tiling pattern consisting of 2 shapes — a rhomboid with angles of 36 and 144 degrees (and reducible to 2 so-called Golden triangles connected base to base) and another with angles of 72 and 108 degrees. (Later I will explain why the numbers 36, 108 and 144 are proto-mythologically important.) When a plane is tiled according to Penrose’s rules the ratio of the number of occurrences of the 1^st rhomboid to the number of occurrences of the 2nd is the aforenoted irrational “number” (i.e. function) called the Golden Mean or Golden Ratio (Phi): 1.161803…. The same Penrose tiling also reveals a pattern of overlapping decagons. Each tile within the pattern is contained in 1 of 2 types of decagons, the ratio of the 2 decagon populations being the Golden Mean.

This particular 5-fold symmetry calls to mind the spooky, non-locally growing, 5-fold-symmetrical quasi-crystals which Penrose thinks may represent the most minute physical correspondence to consciousness.
The Fibonacci series inheres an obvious 12-fold symmetry also, for the number 12 is a factor of every 12^th number — and only every 12^th number — of the Fibonacci series. This indeed is the penultimate obvious symmetry in the series, and together with the aforenoted 5-fold symmetry it amounts to a marked 60-fold symmetry therein.
As my previous comments regarding ziggurats and pyramids indicate, proto-mythologists symbolized 5-ness by coordinating 4 otherwise separate things to meet at a center. Such symbol projected onto 2 dimensions is found in the archaeological record of prehistory everywhere around the world except, or so I’m told, south of the Sahara and in Australia. Its name is “swastika.” The cross is a sub-category of swastika, as is the infamous symbol of the Nazis. When the legs of a swastika are rendered such that they seem to be churning in the clockwise direction (as in the Nazi symbol) the swastika expresses the White/Apollonian paradigm. Indeed, such clockwise swastika is an ancient Teutonic symbol for the dominantly White/Apollonian lightning god Thor. A swastika with legs moving in the counter-clockwise direction, on the other hand, symbolizes the Red/Dionysian. At the beginning of his fine book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen presents an extremely interesting map showing various Himalayan monasteries marked by swastikas of either the clockwise or counter-clockwise type, depending on whether the monastery is a bastion of the Mahayana Buddhist religion or of the relatively aboriginal B’on religion. Consider this excerpt:
Despite his persecution of B’on sorcerers, Padma Sambhava [who established Mahayana Buddhism in Tibet in the 8^th century CE], in the Buddhist tradition of absorbing the local religions, seems to have tolerated the inclusion of much B’on magic in Nyingma, including the grim chöd rites from the pre-Buddhist Tibetan manuscripts known as “Heart-Drops from the Great Space.” The chöd rites may well be much older than B’on itself, deriving from archaic practices of sacrifice and exorcism.
Matthiessen continues, quoting an authority:
‘There is no word for Buddhism in Tibet. Tibetans are either chos-pa (followers of chos — the Dharma or Universal Law as revealed by Buddha) or b’on-pos (followers of bon).’ Yet in practice, B’on has adapted itself so thoroughly to Buddhism, and vice versa, that in their superficial forms they are much the same.
We began this chapter by regarding Yahweh and Delphi; we then coursed through the stars and planets, addressed quantum mathematics and perhaps quantum physics, and ended up in the monasteries of the Himalaya. If good old Yahweh is as complex as this analysis suggests, we should expect this complexity to be evident in Hebrew mythology. As you know, a prime and early character in that mythology is Abraham. A survey of Abraham’s legendary journey (as Abram) from Ur (a former capital of Sumeria) to Canaan will therefore be a good way for us to further our understanding of Yahweh’s complexity.
Straightaway in this respect we notice that Abram’s journey is indeed described as proceeding in the counter-clockwise direction, the direction significant of (and native to) the Red/Dionysian. Moreover, Abram is a son of Terah, who is a 9^th-generation descendant of Noah’s Red/Dionysian eldest son Shem — the other sons of Noah being Japheth (a White/Apollonian character) and Ham (the youngest son; akin to Hamlet and Horus and Joyce’s Shaun; a White/Apollonian character and “father of Canaan,” which land and people Yahweh nevertheless curses such that they are destined to be dominated by the descendents of both Shem and Japheth). As a 9^th generation descendent of Shem, Terah should likewise be considered Red/Dionysian. Terah’s other sons are Haran and Nahor. Haran has already — and rather mysteriously — died by the time Terah and family leave Ur, but not before fathering a son, Lot. Haran’s death leaves Nahor as the lone brother of Abram. Abram is Red/Dionysian, Nahor is White/Apollonian. Indeed Abram’s Red/Dionysian character seems to be emphasized in terms of Haran’s death, for Haran in dying becomes Red/Dionysian. In a sense, Abram is equivalent to the dead Haran.
Accordingly we should expect that the name Abram signifies the Red/Dionysian. Consider in this respect the root ram. Ramadan is the 9^th month of the Islamic year. The Latin ramus means “branch” and is akin to the Latin radix, “root.” The Low German ram means “cream.” The Hindu Rama is an avatar of Vishnu, the chief Red/Dionysian god of the Indian pantheon. Vishnu is the preserver — as a poet or priest is a preserver — and is symbolized by the lion. The Egyptian Ra, equivalent to the Sun, is proto-mythologically female. Abraham, you see, is lion of the desert, Sun of the desert; he is a feminine male, like Joyce’s Jewish Leopold Bloom, like Joyce’s Shem, and like Joyce himself.
No reason is given for the commencement of Abram and company’s journey to Canaan, but it is implicitly a working out of the destiny whereby the descendents of Noah’s Shem shall dominate the descendents of Ham. This destined domination seems to be a proto-mythological thesis/recognition: the elder sibling should/does rule over the younger, the Red/Dionysian should/does rule over the White/Apollonian. Terah, Abram and his wife Sarai, along with Nahor and Lot and the rest trek from Ur toward Canaan. Midway, however, when the group reaches the most northerly point of the journey — at the town called Haran (or Harran; focal point of the Fertile Crescent) — they stop and settle there (for no stated reason). We can infer that Haran is mythologically related to the dead brother Haran and that it is a naturally attractive place. Terah eventually dies there in Haran. Thus Terah becomes united with his dead son Haran and also, in this sense, with Abram.
Only now does Yahweh enter the picture, instructing Abram to move onward to Canaan. “I will make of you a great nation … and by you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed.” Heeding Yahweh, Abram and his entourage set out toward Canaan. Eventually Yahweh establishes the famous covenant with Abram according to which Abram will be father of a “multitude of nations.” And finally Yahweh promises to Abram “all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession,” which covenant Yahweh punctuates by adding the suffix -ham to Abram’s name. This suffix recalls the name of Noah’s youngest, White/Apollonian son and is said to signify plurality. Thus the name Abraham seems to mean “branch branch,” “ramify ramify.”
Yahweh seals the deal with the newly renamed Abraham by commanding that “every male among you shall be circumcised,” which sacrifice of sorts is generally meant to initiate a boy into male maturity, i.e. to subsume the puerile, White/Apollonian relation between he and his mother in a mysterious, Red/Dionysian relation between he and another, masculine mother: the priests.
As we’ve noted, Haran (Harran) itself seems to be a very special place. In the story of Abraham, Haran is reached by a counter-clockwise movement; it exerts a mysterious attraction on the party; it is a place of revelation and completion, of death and destiny; and it is a relatively high place, both in elevation and in the sense of its extremely northerly location on Abram’s path. Indeed, as the map below emphasizes, Haran is akin to the so-called ben ben of a pyramid, to the top of a ziggurat, to the summit of a primeval mound, to the center of a swastika, and likewise to the season of sacrifice, the moment of (quantum) gravity, of multeity-in-unity, of beauty.

But what of Haran’s actual history? Located on the western shore of the Balikh River in southeast Turkey, between the Euphrates and the Tigris and within but at the northernmost frontier of the ancient kingdom of Mari, Haran was captured sometime before 1700 BCE by the Hurrians, who seem to have arrived from the relatively northeastern mountains near the twin lakes Van and Urmia on the far side of Tigris River. Considerable evidence now suggests that the Habiru — who became the Hebrews — emerged not out of the ethnic Canaanites but rather out of the Hurrians. If so, it was only in the process of this emergence that the Habiru language took on Canaanite forms and thus changed into the essentially Semitic Hebrew language we know today. The Hurrians spoke an agglutinative language seemingly unrelated to Indo-European and Semitic languages — although they were governed by a class of foreign, Vedic (i.e. Aryan, Indo European) Mitannite nobility. In this sense the Hurrians — and hence the Hebrews — were a dominantly Red/Dionysian people relative to the White/Apollonian Mitanni.
The name Haran is said to mean “mountaineer” and “parched,” and it is probably linked to the Akkadian charana or harannu, meaning “road.” Haran in fact was known for the excellence of its water and is located where the ancient road north from Damascus intersected (i.e. coincided with) the ancient east–west road from Nineveh to Carchemish. Haran was also called Carrhae. Here the Roman Crassus and later the Roman Caracalla were slain, in 5 BCE and 217 CE, respectively. (Legend says molten gold was poured down Crassus’s throat.) Clearly Haran exerted an ominous attractive power on the Romans as well as on Terah and Abram. Haran was indeed home to the chief temple of the Assyrian Moon god Sin, a.k.a. Nanna. (Yes, Sin, as in Joyce’s Shaun). The other chief site of Sin worship was Ur. In the later centuries of the last era, Haran became a center of the Hermetic philosophy, i.e. the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistos (Hermes “Thrice Greatest” or “Most Great” or “Tree Greatest”), which philosophy deals primarily with the contrary notions of multiplicity and unity. Haran later served as the last bastion (relative to Islam; c. 10^th century CE) of the so-called Sabaeans (from the verb meaning “to immerse, to plunge in”), pagan worshippers of the stars and of planets. Eventually the first Islamic university was established in Haran. Today Haran is characterized by its bee-hive homes, which typically consist of 2 cones joined by an archway. These structures are extremely unique and call to mind the deep association between bees and the temple at Delphi, “the bee hive.”

It's fair to say that Haran is extremely charged in the proto-mythological sense. Consider its relation to Hermes, Greek equivalent of the Egyptian Thoth and Upuat. Hermes is god of boundaries, enclosures, crossroads, passes, summits. Herms, after which the god is named, are cairns — little pyramids, little ziggurats, piles of stones — marking such important points/coincidences. Joyce wrote to his friend Frank Budgen: “…Hermes [is] the god of public ways, and is the invisible influence … which saves in the case of accident. … Hermes is the god of signposts: i.e. he is, especially for a traveler like Ulysses, the point at which roads parallel merge and roads contrary also. He is an accident of providence.”

Likewise the word cairn — which certainly seems cognate with Haran — resonates. It is related to the words crown and corona and chorus (“ring dance”) and to the titles/names Kronos (which means “crow”), Hermes/Carnival/Tristan/Drustan (the herm/cairn/boundary/tree/3/phallus god, i.e. the Green Man) and Crone (Ker/Gar/Ger/Car/Cer/Cor/Kol/Kal, the carrion or flesh goddess and likewise the goddess of the herm/cairn/boundary/tree/3/phallus, as in the Caryatids, i.e. the Green Woman, the triple-Goddess). The crow was considered an oracular bird hosting the soul of the sacrificed king.
High, spring-fed groves akin to Haran were proto-mythologically considered sacred, primal, providential gardens, Earthly, horticultural paradises. Likely marked (or bounded) by herms (such as the pile of stones which Odin wills to accumulate beneath him as he hangs on the World Tree), these gardens were natural altars, i.e. places of multeity-in-unity, beauty, gravity, sacrifice. They were natural strongholds as well, natural inns, enclosures, the bases eventually of castles and of the hamlets (from the Old English ham, “village, home”) that sprung up around them.
The very name Haran will serve as our chief point of departure to an incredibly rich etymological treasure trove. For starters, note that Haran is in fact cognate with the Latin arae, which word refers to said primeval forest groves. Ploughed fields were likewise called arate. In Syria the word ari means “lion,” and most of the names of the cities there begin or end with Ara(m), “altar.” Syria itself was called Aramea or Aramia. Hence the name of the Aramaic language, which became the business language in the Middle East. Hermes, importantly, is also god of the market, of exchange, and of thievery…. Likewise we have the term Arab. The grand mosque in Mecca (which Saudi Arabian city is alternatively named Makkah, Bakka, and Baca) is named Masjid al-Harâm, where Masjid means “mosque” and Harâm means “inviolate area, restricted area” (for only Muslims may enter it). India’s Upanishads feature a pond called Ara, which is located in the underworld. The unwise drown in this pond, but the wise cross it using mere strength of mind. As I noted earlier, the English word pond stems from the Middle English poundes, “enclosure,” as in, say, “dog pound.”
The name Aaron is another cognate of Haran. According to biblical lore, Aaron is the older brother of Moses. Their father is Amram, who dies aged 137 years. Of Aaron it is said, “he [in contrast to Moses] can speak well.” Indeed, Aaron becomes the chief priest of Israel. Clearly Aaron is a Red/Dionysian figure. Both of these brothers are of the tribe Levi, whose eponymous patriarch is the son of Leah and Jacob. Levi, too, dies aged 137 years. The tribe of Levi is in fact distinguished as the priestly tribe of the Hebrews. As such, Levites are the tribe responsible for performing the sacrifices upon the altar.
The name Aaron recalls the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. In the Irish language these 3 islands are called the Oileáin Árainn (the Islands Aran) — the word for island being linked to the word oil, this because oil in water is like an island. (In the name Árainn, the i before the nn serves merely to indicate the palatization of the n.) The Irish ára (dative árainn) literally means “loin” or “kidney.” Here we have a double reference to sacrifice, for oil and kidneys are primary ingredients of ancient offerings. The biblical Exodus and Leviticus together specify that the following sacrifices should involve the kidneys (and “the fat that is on them at the loins”) of a ram: the sin offering, the sacrifice at the consecration of priests, the peace offerings, guilt offerings, and the ordination offering for priests.
In Greek the noun ara also means “harmful object,” “fury,” “vow.” The Greek god of war Ares is also god of altars, the very hearts of communities. Likewise the Latin god of war Mars is also god of the market place. Which is to say, Ares/Mars is Hermes. As Giambattista Vico points up in his New Science — which classic Joyce methodically referenced in creating Finnegans Wake — the Latin noun hara “survived in the sense of sty,” i.e. a pen, an enclosure, a pound, especially for swine, this in contrast to a stylus, a writing instrument. Joyce refers to himself as Shem the Penman, at once indicating his room, his writing utensil, and his complex but dominantly Red/Dionysian nature. Here Joyce is likely also referring to his brotherhood with Symeon the Stylite, c. 390–459 CE, who lived atop a column, á la Odin on the World Tree. Note the Sy- prefix in this name; it is equivalent to Si- and Se-. Symeon inspired the likes of Daniel, 409–93 CE, who lived for 33 years atop a column near Constantinople. Joyce is also referring to the twins Ephialtes and Otus (the so-called Aloeids), bastard sons of Iphimedeia, daughter of Triops, and sired by Poseidon. These twins grew 1 fathom in height and 1 cubit in breadth every year, and when they reached the age of 9 years they declared war on Olympus. Ephialtes swore on the river Styx to rape Hera, and Otus did the same regarding Artemis. Eventually defeated, the twins descended to Tartarus and were there tied back to back to a pillar on top of which the Nymph Styx now forever sits to remind them of the oaths they took on her. They are called “sons of the threshing floor,” their mother being “she who strengthens the genitals,” their grandmother being “3-Face” (Hecate), and they worship the 3 Muses — whom Zeus begot on Mnemosyne (“Memory”; the prefix Mne- being equivalent to the name Manu) over the course of 9 nights, such that some say there are 9 Muses. These twins are equivalent to the Giants — which, I think and as I will later explain, represent dreams and especially the nightmare, i.e. the triple-Goddess as she visits us each night. Odin’s nights are impressed by “the Nightmare and her 9-fold”; British legend likewise associates the number 9 with the Nightmare.
By the way, an ancient pupil using a stylus would inscribe characters into a wax tablet which could then be smoothed. The original wax used by humans was beeswax. It was associated with purity, as in the Latin term tabula rasa. The word wax is related to the Greek auxanein and the Latin augēre, “to increase,” and hence to the Moon and to augury. As such, a writer crafting characters is akin to a bee crafting a hive and, a priest marking the progress of the Moon/king, and a prophet interpreting providence. Beeswax was also the original wax for candles. In fact beeswax has the highest melting point of any wax. Beeswax candles burn considerably brighter, longer, with a richer spectrum and with less smoke than do either the petroleum-based paraffin candles familiar to us now or the tallow candles (feeble, smelly, smoky) common in the Middle Ages; they are also naturally fragrant, smelling of honey. The prehistoric cave paintings were likely created in the glow of beeswax candles. Like the tabula rasa, a candle represents purity. The dualites candle and flame, tablet and stylus, stone/clay/bark/papyrus/vellum/paper and ink, are White–Red dualities. I should add that the god Pan — considered the guardian of bees — created his famous pipes by joining reeds together with beeswax. Reeds of course were also used as styli. So there is a connection between Pan the Piper, Shem the Penman, and the bee. Impressed wax was also considered valuable in terms of seals and was likewise used as coin. In this sense, as well as in its actually color, beeswax is an original gold.
According to Vico, hara must originally have meant “victim” — “and it clearly derives from haruspex, seer, so called for consulting the entrails of victims slain at the altars.” In accord with the White/Apollonian paradigm, these sacrificial victims were called hostiae in Latin (from hostes, “enemies,” and cognate with the English hostages) and were referred to as “Saturn’s victims.” Saturn, as noted earlier, represents the high priest, Upuat, Thoth, Hermes, Joyce.
The har/ar- prefix is moreover closely related to the Greek harmes, meaning “joint.” Here again is the notion of separation, transition, sacrifice, creation, multeity-in-unity, beauty, (quantum) gravity. This meaning is deeply related to the fact that sacrificed humans and animals were occasionally torn limb from limb. In har/ar- we likewise have the root of the English words harmony, art, and harm, the latter of which means both “injury” and “mischief” and stems also from the Old Church Slavonic scramu, meaning “shame.” In this light we can largely understand the Peeping Tom accusation leveled against Joyce’s Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the Phoenix figure in Finnegans Wake. Joyce knew that shamus is slang for “police officer” and that it derives from the Yiddish shames, meaning “a sexton in a synagogue.” A sexton is a person who performs minor but nevertheless ceremonial duties, such as ringing a bell and digging graves; he is a janitor; without him a sacred place would not function. The word janitor derives from the Latin janus or janua, meaning “arch” or “gate.” Hence the name of the 1^st month of the modern calendar: January. The god Janus — characterized by the 2 contrary faces — is god of the New Year, god of thresholds, god of transitions, of boundaries, joints, harmes. Janus, like Ares/Mars, is Hermes. Frazer in the Golden Bough recognizes Janus as being equivalent to both Jupiter and Zeus. Concomitantly Frazer recognizes Jana, female consort of Janus, as being equivalent to the Greek pair of goddesses Dione and Hera (Red and White, respectively) and likewise to the corresponding Latin pair Diana and Juno (again, Red and White). Note the Di- prefix in the names Dione and Diana (“Diana of the Crossroads”; a.k.a. Trivia). Here again is the old *deywo-s, “celestial, luminous, radiant,” as in Dyeus, Deus, Zeus. Dione is consort of Zeus at Dodona. And it is from the great oak at Dodona that the (oracular) Argo is fashioned by Argus. Again, the Ar- prefix.
The root Di- also means “to divide,” as in the Greek word daiesthai. This word is linked to the Greek daimon, “demon,” and to the Latin dicere, “to say,” (as in dictate and dice), all of which are further related to tide and time. Here you see that the roots di- and ti- (as in Titans and Tityos and Tethys) are closely related — even more so than are the numbers 2 and 1, which numbers these prefixes otherwise respectively correspond to. In this sense di- and ti- — and likewise de-, te-, si-, se-, vi-, ve-, wi-, we- — mean “complex,” i.e. White–Red.
I’m reminded of the Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton’s understanding of complex (“imaginary”) numbers. It was while walking across a stone bridge over the river Liffey in Dublin that Hamilton finally recognized the proper description of a complex number relative to 3 dimensions requires 4 components rather than just 3, this because the orientation of the 3-component complex vector, as it were, relative to the 3-dimensions is not uniquely determined by the 3 components. Hamilton stopped on the spot and carved the corollary equations — the equations of the “quaternions” — into the bridge, where they can be seen to this day. Generally well liked, gregarious, but of a poetic nature and practice, Hamilton was disappointed in love, and for solace in this regard especially he increasingly turned the great bulk of his awesome intelligence to drink. He died in 1865, aged 60 years.
Hamilton, it’s fair to say, attended Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s bar/ara. Earwicker is a janitor of sorts. He tends bar. He administers firewater. He heaves drops and eavesdrops. He is an earwicker. Wizards, as Robert Graves points up, commonly claimed that their ears had been licked clean by serpents, “which were held to be incarnate spirit of oracular heroes and that they were thus enable to understand the language of birds and insects.” Athena, it is said, after blinding Teiresias, was moved by his suffering and therefore detached from her aegis the serpent Erichthonios and ordered it to, “Cleanse Teiresias’s ears with your tongue that he may understand the language of prophetic birds.” Simply put, Humphrey, like every janitor, is a god — the god, the hero. Earwicker’s tavern is a holy place, its bar an altar. Likewise that bar is akin to a ferry; it takes people to another “place.” In Sanskrit the word yāna means “ferry.” The barkeep paces the bar like a ferryman paces a river, and like a lion paces a cage (pen, sty), like the serpent encircles the tree.

The aforenoted words shame, shamus and sexton — which last word, please note, also indicates the numbers 1, 6, and 7 — are related to shaman, to the names Sean and Shem and Seamus and Shiva, and to shamrock. The true shamrock has a yellow flower. Later I will explain that the color yellow, like the color orange, represents the proto-mythological.
The Shamrock is a kind of clover (Trifolium repens, “3-leaved creeper”). The Irish word for clover is seamar; the German word is Klee. In Greek kle/cli means “glory, victory,” as in both Herakles (“Hera’s Glory,” Hercules) and Clio (muse of history). The Greek klimax means “ladder”; it is the root of the English climax and climate, and it is closely related to latitude. In French clé means “key.” According to legend, twigs of mistletoe — essentially reachable only via ladder, for the planet is a sort of evergreen parasite that grows only among the branches of deciduous trees — are master keys, capable indeed of opening all locks. The magical “golden bough” featured in the Greco-Roman myth of the Trojan warrior Aeneas (whose name means “of copper or bronze”) is closely related if not identical to mistletoe. Said golden bough functions for Aeneas as a key, allowing him passage to the underworld despite the otherwise prohibitive fact that he is still alive. This passage occurs just prior to Aeneas’s arrival in Latium and marks Aeneas as a now dominantly Red/Dionysian, Jupiter-like, Cepheus-like figure. Likewise, Aeneas's birth from Aphrodite, his rather singular escape from Troy, and his eventual elevation to immortality — as the god Indiges, from the Latin indu, endo, meaning “in, within —” mark him as an Osiris-like, Hermes-like, Hercules-like, Pelops-like, Ganymede/Aquarius-like, Castor–Polydeuces-like (a.k.a. Dioscuri-like) type; i.e. an extremely complex, complete, White–Red–Black type. The twins Remus and Romulus are descendents of the extremely complex Aeneas, this through their mother; their father is Mars. The Irish name of Dublin is Baile Átha Cliath (bal´ye áha cléah), “Place of the Ford of the Hurdles.” Thus we have an intimate and rather contrasting set of notions: key, climax/peak, and hurdle. In 1600 the Englishman John Head commented in regard to Dublin: “Many of its inhabitants call this city Divlin, quasi Divel’s Inn [i.e. Devil’s Inn, Deus’s Inn], and very properly it is by them so termed; for there is hardly in the world a city that entertains such devil’s imps as that doth.” The word hurdle is akin to the Latin cratis, meaning “wickerwork, hurdle.” Thus we are pointed again to the notion of a pen, a wall, an enclosure, a pound, pond, ara.
Mistletoe deserves our further attention straightaway. The name seems to derive from the ancient understanding that this plant springs to life from bird droppings in the tops of trees. The root word mistel is Anglo Saxon for “dung,” and the suffix -toe means “twig.” Mistletoe grows into nebulous, nest-like forms, sometimes more than 1 meter in diameter. The shrub produces inconspicuous, yellowish flowers (in March/April) and whitish-yellow berries (in autumn) containing only 1 seed each. These berries are eaten by birds, which then tend to defecate the seeds in the tree tops, where the seeds naturally take root. Mistletoe is most obvious in autumn and winter, owing initially to the berries and then to its evergreen nature relative to the bare, brown branches surrounding it. The evergreen nature of mistletoe is linked to the ancient belief that the mistletoe is the seat of a tree’s life. The fact that mistletoe grows not from the ground but from the branches and trunk of a tree seems to confirm this belief. Hence, too, the ancient notion that mistletoe should not be allowed to touch the ground. Mistletoe, also known as ixias (as in Ixion), is remarkably intermediate, akin to the planetary component of the matrix, and especially akin to the Sun; it is an intermediary kind of fire, the fire of Hermes. According to the homeopathic principles of proto-mythology, this fiery, inflammatory nature corresponded as well to anti-inflammatory properties, both medicinally and literally, and this is why mistletoe is kept in houses as a safeguard against conflagration. Fight fire with fire, as they say. Indeed, mistletoe was believed to possess many marvelous medicinal properties.
As such, mistletoe seems extremely significant of the complex, mediating hero, the self-sacrificing Odin type, the messenger, i.e. the very substance of existence, the monad. But if mistletoe is an evergreen, why is it so closely linked to the golden bough? Well, mistletoe is traditionally gathered either at the winter or summer solstice. And a cut bough of mistletoe thoroughly assumes a rich golden color after about 5 or 6 months. As such, mistletoe harvested at the beginning of summer will be golden in November, when winter arrives, i.e. when the hero must enter the underworld. Mistletoe punctuating the top of trees in late autumn is in fact marvelously akin to Cepheus atop the World Tree.

In this light consider the following famous passage from Pliny, as quoted by Frazer, regarding mistletoe and the Druids:
The mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is found, they gather it with solemn ceremony. This they do above all on the sixth day of the moon, from whence they date the beginnings of their months, of their years, and of the thirty years’ cycle, because by the sixth day the moon has plenty of vigour and has not run half its course. After due preparations have been made for sacrifice and a feast under the tree, they hail it as the universal healer and bring to the spot two white bulls, whose horns have never been bound before. A priest clad in white robe climbs into the tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloth. They then sacrifice the victims, praying that God may make his own gift to prosper with those upon whom he has bestowed it. They believe that a potion prepared from mistletoe will make barren animals to bring forth, and that the plant is a remedy against all poison.
By the way, the name Druid is thought to mean “oak man.” In German this is “Eiche Mann.” (Yes, as in the the name of infamous Nazi SS officer Adolph Eichmann, who organized the Nazi’s “final solution” of their supposed “Jewish problem.”) This epithet is very close to “eigen man,” i.e. “quantum man,” “force man.” It is also linked to Drustan, a.k.a. Tristan, and likewise to the P-I-E initial warrior Trito and the Greek Triptolemus. Furthermore the title is intimately related to the German drei, meaning “3,” and to the English tree, which stems from the Old Norse tre, “tree,” and the Greek drys, “wood.” This is the sense in which the aforementioned Hermes Trismegistos is literally Hermes Tree Greatest, i.e. the greatest aspect of Hermes: Hermes sacrificed upon the World Tree.
In Norse myth mistletoe represents the singular and very subtle weakness of the otherwise indefatigable, predominantly White/Apollonian Balder, son of Odin and Frigg. Balder is killed, according to the Icelandic legend, by the blind, Red/Dionysian god Hodr, Balder’s older brother, who is tricked by (Red/Dionysian) Loki, the god of fire, into piercing Balder through with a branch of the strange plant. At Frigg’s behest, Balder’s other brother Hermod (akin to Hermes, the messenger) is sent to the underworld, to the goddess Hel (Kolyo, Kupalo, Kalypso, Kali, Persephone, etc.), to ask for Balder’s release. In a Danish version of the story, which version is likely older than the Icelandic, Hodr (Shem) and Balder (Shaun) are rivals for the love of Nanna (Issy, Iseult, Isis, Athena–Persephone — the Sumerian Inanna). Balder is therein portrayed as a hateful character, and Hodr eventually kills him with a magic sword.
Thus the mythological significance of mistletoe seems rooted in the analogy if not identity between it and the hero in his moment of self-sacrifice. Yet to my mind the associations attaching and attached to mistletoe — dung, golden bough, fire, Sun, medicine, hero — point deeper and elsewhere in human prehistory: precisely to the wild honeycomb and especially to that of the migratory, undomesticated, and dangerous Apis dorsata, world’s largest honey bee, which bee prefers to nest on the branches of the tualang tree, Asia’s tallest tree (growing up to 80 meters high) and is actually a member of the legume (bean) family. The tualang grows in the lowland rainforests of southern Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, northeastern Sumatra, Borneo and Palawan. Although common in these forests the tualang is not naturally abundant therein; they tower above the canopy, their initial branches not occuring until about 30 meters above ground. Presumably Apis dorsata prefers to nest in these and the higher branches — or elsewhere in Asia on sheer cliff faces — because of the extreme separation (and hence safety) these afford from the rest of the habitat. A single tulang tree may contain about 100 Apis dorsata nests, and each nest, with the profile of a half-Moon and up to 1.5 meters across, may contain about 30,000 bees. From such a tree some 450 kg (about 1000 pounds) of honey can be harvested.

The true golden bough? Combs of Apis dorsata high in a tualang tree.
The protective network of interlocking bees densely covering the surface recall the “woolen” net covering the omphalos of Delphi. Every few minutes the whole surface of this living aegis mysteriously ripples outward from the center.

As University of Arizona entomologist Stephen Buchmann describes in his wonderful Letters from the Hive, the traditional honey hunts are performed on the tualang trees during Moon-less nights in February and March. The bees cannot attack without ambient light. About 4 of the 7 or so honey hunters climb the tree using wood-and-vine ladders and carrying leathern buckets (or wicker baskets), bone — decidely not metal — knives made of the shoulder bone of a cow, and liana torches (made of tough liana vines pounded to soft, pliable fibers and bound into 2-meter long bundles about 8 cm thick and capable of burning for a whole night). The shoulder bone recalls the myth of Pelops, eventual conquerer of the Pelopenesse, i.e. of Apia. See below. But why the torches (akin to Roman fasces) if the bees need ambient light to attack? Because the bees inveterately follow points of light. The hunters ascend to a branch above a nest. Meanwhile other members of the hunting party wait at the base of the tree and begin to chant:
“Hitam Manis Ooooi!”
(Sweet Dark One, Ooooi!)
“Turunlah dengan chahaya bintang”
(Come down with the falling stars)
“Turun dengan lemah lembutnya”
(Come down gracefully)
The Sweet Dark One, I suggest, is especially akin to Aphrodite (and likewise to Persephone, Pallas, Electra, Andromeda, Helen, etc) — whom the Greeks called Melaenis, “Black One,” Scotia, “Dark One,” Androphonos, “Man-slayer,” and Epitymbra, “(She) of the Tombs” — and more generally to the Triple Goddess, i.e. the Tree Goddess, the Green Woman, and likewise to Hermes (and Aquarius, etc) and the Triple Man, Tree Man, Green Man. The Greek word for honey is meli, as in melissai. So you see, the Greeks pointedly confused blackness and sweetness, too. The falling stars mentioned in the chant are the falling embers of the torch, for the hunter above the nest is now banging his torch on his branch, sending a rain of embers past the nest. Virtually all the bees follow this rain to the ground, where they find themselves disoriented. Unable to return through the darkness to their nest, the bees harmlessly spend the night resting on low vegetation. The hunter then descends to the — dung-like, you might say — comb, cuts it from its bough using the bone knife, and folds it into his leathern bucket (an aegis of sorts). These buckets are lowered to the ground, where they are emptied and pulled aloft again. The honey is squeezed out of the combs into large containers. The night’s hunt is finally punctuated with a ceremony whereby the leader carefully selects the initial honeycomb taken, utters some honors to the “unseen owner” of the forest, and tosses the honeycomb as deep as possible into the forest behind the tree.
Regarding the aforementioned chant and its connection to Aphrodite, we will do well to consider Professor Buchmann’s recounting of his colleague Professor Makhdzir Bin Mardan’s telling of the ancient Malaysian fable that explains the origins of tualang honey hunting:
Long ago a princess of the royal family had a Hindu handmaiden, a dusky beauty called Hitam Manis or “Sweet Dark One.” The handmaiden fell hopelessly in love with the sultan’s son, a handsome prince who requited her passion. But their love was doomed, for she was a commoner, and marriage of a commoner to a prince of the blood was strictly forbidden. When the sultan learned of the romance, he flew into a rage, and Hitam Manis, along with the other handmaidens, the Dayang, had to flee the palace for their very lives. As the terrifed young women escaped into the forest, they were pursued by the sultan’s guards, who hurled long metal spears at them. When one of the spears pierced the already broken heart of Hitam Manis, miraculously she did not die. Instead, she and the other handmaidens were transformed into a swarm of bees and disappeared into the night. Thus were born the giant honey bees of the Asian rainforests.
Years later, the still grieving prince — now engaged to a proper princess — noticed a large honeycomb high in the branches of a tualang tree in the forest. When he climbed the tree to investigate, he discovered a large carche of golden honey. He called down for his servants to send up a metal knife and bucket so he could harvest the treasure. The servants dutifully sent the knife and bucket up to the prince, but when they lowered the now heavy pail a few minutes later, to their shock and horror, they found the prince’s dismembered body inside.
From the treetops, a ghoulish voice cried out that he had committed a sacrilege by cutting the honeycomb with a sharp metal knife. Unwittingly, the prince had insulted poor Hitam Manis, reminding her of the cold metal spear that had pierced her heart and so changed her life.
But the Sweet Dark One took pity on the prince she had once loved, and released a golden shower that restored him to life and limb.
To this day, in deference to the dying anguish of the handmaiden known as Hitam Manis, honey hunters never use tools made of metal — only those of wood, cowhide, and bone.
Hitam Manis = princess of the St. George story = dragon = Aphrodite = Andromeda. The Dayang = proto-mythological college of man-killing nymphs = bees = Pleiades = melissai = supposedly woolen net on the omphalos of Delphi. (During the aforedescribed honey hunt the hunters, all male, refer to themselves as Dayang.) Robert Graves:
Aphrodite Urania (“queen of the mountain”) or Erycina (“of the heather” [as in Erichthonios, i.e. Eri-cthonios, “heather of Gaia”, the snake/fish-tailed son of Hephaistos and Gaia, equivalent to the charioteer Auriga, Ganymede/Aquarius, and, as we shall see, Pelops]) was the nymph-goddess of midsummer [or autumn]. She destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs. Hence the heather-loving bees and the red robe in her mountain-top affair with Anchises; hence also the worship of Cybele, the Phrygian Aphrodite of Mount Ida, as a queen-bee, and the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory of her lover Attis [i.e. Odys(seus), Odin, etc].
Daedalus built a golden honeycomb shrine to Aphrodite — on coastal Mount Eryx in northwest Sicily. The ancient Maya, I should add, called the planet Venus (i.e. Aphrodite) Xuk Ek, the “Wasp Star.”
Note in the myth of Hitam Manis the significations of the Great Reversal: nubile woman not man as outsider, commoner; metal as the downfall of female power. Note just as well the irrepressible proto-mythologic: dismembered honeycomb = Moon = Delphi temple = omphalos = penis = male hero who is sacrificed by the college of nymphs; the bees give up their nest, their inn, like the nymphs give up their king; but in the king is the sweet, golden vitality of life, which they consume and thus conserve. (In ancient Greece the pear tree as considered sacred to the Moon.) As for the golden shower, it certainly calls to mind the story that Zeus fathered Perseus (alias St. George), savior of Andromeda, by descending on the imprisoned princess Danae as a shower of golden rain. Danae had been imprisoned in a bronze tower by her father Acrisius because a prophecy foretold that the initial son of Danae would kill Acrisius. Perseus eventually did kill Acrisius — by accident, with a discus. Professor Mardan explained to Professor Buchmann that the golden showers referred to in the Malaysian honey hunting fable are actually mass defecations made by Apis dorsata during their crepuscular flights, when they rid themselves of feces and thus of unwanted heat. During the Vietnam War, Buchmann points outs, American soldiers had mistaken these showers for dreaded yellow rain, a biological weapon.

I mentioned that the highly symbolic use of cow shoulder bone knives by the traditional honey hunters of Malaysia calls to mind the myth of Pelops, conqueror of Apia — and variously referred to, I should add, as “muddy face” and, more importantly, “Cronian One.” Similarly the dismembered and resurrected prince in the story of Hitam Manis is remarkbly akin to Pelops. Indeed, the fundamental and epochal contrast and conflict between proto-mythology and the forces behind the Great Reversal seems to be the theme of both myths. Pelops is a beautiful boy dismembered by his father Tantalus — whose own father Tmolus is described as wreathed with oak — and presented by him to the Olympian gods as food, this supposedly to test the gods’ omniscience. According to the chief legend here, only the goddess Demeter (mother of the nymph-like Persephone) — or else the sea-goddess (á la Aphrodite) Thetis — partakes of the feast, consuming a piece of Pelops’ left shoulder. Zeus then damns Tantalus to Tartarus and resurrects Pelops, giving the young man a new, ivory shoulder. Poseidon — counterpart to the sea goddess Aphrodite — promptly whisks Pelops to Olympus to be his personal cup-bearer, as Zeus later does with the Trojan Ganymede (alias Aquarius). Said cups, of course, contain nectar. Eventually returned to Earth, Pelops becomes a champion charioteer, akin to and aided by Poseidon. (Auriga/Erichthonios/Hephaistos — the Golden Apple in the celestial “Sea” — is said to have invented the chariot to compensate for his lameness. He is likewise the aural one, the Earwicker or Eri-wicker, heather-wicker.) But to defeat King Oenomaus of Elis in a chariot race and thus win princess Hippodameia’s hand and with it the kingdom of Elis, Pelops needs to enlist the aid of Oenomaus’s chariot-keeper and sometimes charioteer Myrtilus, a son of Hermes. Hippodameia (“horse-tamer”) has indeed fallen in love with Pelops. Yet Myrtilus, too, has (bashfully) expressed love for Hippodameia. Therefore Pelops promises to Myrtilus both the sole company of Hippodameia on the night of victory and half the kingdom of Elis. Myrtilus goes along with the plan and therefore removes the lynch-pins from the axles of Oenomaus’s chariot, replacing them with replicas made of wax. Consequently as Oenomaus, who had given Pelops a head start, is about to catch him and, according to the rules of the (proto-mythological) contest, spear him in the back (that spear, along with Oenomaus’s pair of wind-begotten mares, old gifts from Ares, Oenomaus’s father), the wax axles finally fail and Oenomaus is dragged to death — but not before discerning the betrayal and cursing Myrtilus to a death at the hands of Pelops. The victorious Pelops, Hippodameia and Myrtilus celebrate with an evening drive across the sea, yet when Myrtilus attempts to claim his precious night with Hippodameia, Pelops casts him into the sea. As Myrtilus drowns, he lays a curse on Pelops and on the heirs thereof. Pelops drives on to the western stream of Oceanus, where Hephaistos, husband of Aphrodite, purifies him of guilt. Returning to Pisa in Elis and assuming there the throne of Oenomaus, Pelops proceedes to conquer the whole of Apia and renames it the Peloponnese, “Pelop’s Island.” Graves: “Descent remained matrilinear in the Peloponnese, which assured the goodwill of the conservative peasantry.” The curse leveled by Myrtilus upon the house of Pelops especially affects the house of Atreus, who is Pelops’ eldest son, father of Agamemnon and Menelaos, and said to be the first astronomer to correctly predict using mathematics an eclipse of the Sun by the Moon. Famously Agamemnon in his turn fails to honor the aid which the Myrmidon Achilles — a sea god of sorts — gives to him. This slight motivates Achilles to abstain from the fight against Troy.
In the present light note that the word apis means not only “bee” and “far off” (as in Apollo and apple) and “pear tree”; it is also (and likewise) the Greek name for Egypt's most divine, bull-like god: Hapi or Hap or Hp — who is equivalent to their human-like god of the Nile — who goes by the same name but is pictured as an androgynous old man with pendulous breasts — a water god like Poseidon and Odysseus and Achilles. The name Hapi seems cognate with Hephaistos and with Hebe — the latter being a female and the original cup-bearer to the Greek gods. Note again in this connection that the Greek hepta, as in Hephaistos, means “7,” as in the 7 planets/wanderers. Hebe seems equivalent to the Hittite Hepatu, who has been equated with Hawwa, “Mother of all Living,” which name certainly smacks of Huwawa/Humbaba, i.e. the Tree Man–Woman of the Gilgamesh epic. Here too, seemingly, is Hipta, the Earth-mother to whom Dionysus was given for safekeeping and who carried him in a winnowing basket. Hebe as cup-bearer was eventually supplanted Pelops and then, after Pelops returned to Earth (with the Great Reversal), by Ganymede, and was then married off to Hercules, poster boy of the Great Reversal.
By the way, here is the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid containing the famous reference to the golden bough:
A tree’s dark shade conceals a bough whose leaves
And pliant twigs are all of gold, a thing
sacred to Juno [Hera] of the lower world.
The whole grove shelters it, and thickest shade
In dusky valleys shuts it in. And yet
No one may enter hidden depths
Below the earth unless he picks this bough,
The tree’s fruit, with its foliage of gold.
Proserpina [Persephone] decreed this bough, as due her,
Should be given into her own fair hands
When torn away. In place of it a second
Grows up without fail, all gold as well,
Flowering with metallic leaves again.
So lift your eyes and search, and once you find it
Pull away the bough. It will come willingly,
Easily, if you are called by fate.
Later in the Aeneid we find the following passage involving a tree, a swarm of bees, spectacular fire, matrilinearity, a princess Lavinia (as in Joyce’s Livia), and her destined, proto-mythological marriage to an outsider: namely the Trojan Aeneas — son of Aphrodite.
King Latinus,
Now grown old, had ruled his settled towns
And countryside through years of peace. Tradition
Makes him a son of Faunus by a nymph,
Marica of the Laurentines. The father
Of Faunus had been Picus, who in turn
Claimed you for sire, old Saturn, making you
The founder of the dynasty. By fate
Latinus had no son or male descendant,
Death having taken one in early youth.
A single daughter held that house’s hopes,
A girl now ripe for marriage, for a man.
And many in broad Latium, in Ausonia,
Courted her, but the handsomest by far
Was Turnus, a powerful heir of a great line.
Latinus’s queen [along with Juno/Hera] pressed for their union,
Desiring him with passion for a son,
But heavenly portents, odd things full of dread
Stood in the way. There was a laurel tree
Deep in the inner courtyard of the palace,
Venerated for leafage, prized for years,
Having been found and dedicated there —
So the tale went — to Phoebus by Latinus
When he first built a strongpoint on the site;
And from this laurel tree he gave his folk
The name Laurentines. Here, for a wonder, bees
In a thick swarm, borne through the limpid air
With humming thunder, clustered high on top
And locking all their feet together, hung
In a sudden mass that weighted leaves and bough.
A soothsayer declared: “In this we see
A stranger’s advent, and a body of men
Moving to the same spot from the same zone
To take our fortress.” Then came another sign:
While the old king lit fires at the altars
With pure torch, the girl Lavinia with him,
It seemed her long hair caught, her head-dress caught
In crackling flame, her queenly tresses blazed,
Her jewelled crown blazed. Mantled in smoke
And russet light, she scattered divine fire
Through all the house. No one could hold that sight
Anything but hair-raising, marvelous,
And it was read by seers to mean the girl
Would have renown and glorious days to come,
But that she brought a great war on her people.
Troubled by these strange happenings, the king
Sought out the oracle of his father, Faunus, …
“Propose no Latin alliance for your daughter,
Son of mine [said Faunus]; distrust the bridal chamber
Now prepared. Men from abroad will come
And be your sons by marriage. Blood so mingled
Lifts our name starward. Children of that stock
Will see all earth turned Latin at their feet,
Governed by them, as far as on his rounds
The Sun looks down on Ocean, East or West.”
Hence, according to Virgil, we have the Romans. … Regarding the ominous torching of Lavinia’s hair and dress, consider Professor Buchmann’s account of the aforementioned fireworks used in the Malaysian honey hunt:
When Shukor passed the burning liana torch to his grandfather, we saw the glowing tip arc through the still night air. Soon a cascade of orange embers rained down like a meteor shower from the branches overhead. No Fourth of July fireworks display has ever been so memorable for me. It is a pyrotechnic spectacle that has kept me returning to the bee trees of Pedu Lake year after year.
The Greeks called the Pleiades the kometes, “long-haired”; hence the word comet. The Japanese likewise call the Pleiades the Subaru, “brush stars.” The Subaru automobile company is named after them, hence the company’s 6-star logo, representing the constellation.
Returning, now, to Dublin and to the notion of a hurdle, consider that HCE’s bar is a hurdle of sorts. In regard to that hurdle note that wine, beer, whiskey (from the Irish uisce beathadh, literally “water of life”) and all forms of firewater derive physically from the ara, the garden, the original altar, i.e. Earthly paradise, the Latin lucus, meaning, as Vico points out, “land burned off within a wooded enclosure.” Here is the place of Lucifer, equivalent to Dublin’s Phoenix Park, which name is an Anglicization of the Irish finnischce pairc, literally “brightwaters garden” or “brightwaters enclosure,” the finn- prefix meaning “bright, shining, blonde, fair,” and the -ischce suffix meaning “waters,” as in whiskey. This primeval brightness attaches to the bartender Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. In accord with the legends of Finn MacCool, King Arthur (note the Ar- prefix), and King Mark of the 1^st Irish epic, and also in accord with the theories of Heinrich Zimmer, Joyce has characterized HCE a man of Scandinavian extraction, a man of the north, a Protestant, and blond at that. Ellmann reports that Joyce while visiting Copenhagen “was interested in the ancient Irish distinction between the dark and the light Scandinavians, the dubhghalls and fionnghalls, and kept looking to see which type the people [he] passed belonged to. … He liked the postmen with their red coats, the pillarboxes, the [bear-]fur-helmeted guards.”
Joyce’s birthplace, by the way, is Brighton Square, in Rathgar, just outside Dublin proper.
This brings me to Odysseus. Clearly this Greek name is a version of Dyeus. The Romans translated it Ulixes, which version seems largely a union of oulas, “wound,” and ischea, “thigh.” As such, the name means “wounded thigh,” “wounded waters,” and — especially since the verb “to burn” in Greek is euo and in Latin is uro — “burned waters,” as in finnischce pairc, “brightwaters garden.” The very name Europe — i.e. Euro–Pe — seems to mean “wounded-burned-park-rock-home-bird-waters-thigh,” i.e. fire-bird, Phoenix, riser–faller, upper–downer, (quantum) gravitational entity, outer–inner, vagina/womb, Hermes, Mars, Janus. In a fundamental sense, a male is female to the extent that he is wounded. This is a restatement of the immediate relationship Red/Dionysian-to-Black/Baroque, i.e. the priestly type as feminine in contrast to the warrior type as masculine.
Speaking of wounded thighs, you might recall that by some accounts Dionysus is reborn of his father Zeus’s thigh. The Hittite god of the winds was likewise born from the thigh of Kumbabi. The thigh seems to correspond to the constellation Ursa Major, which the Egyptians called “The (Bull’s) Thigh.” The name Dionysus is clearly yet another version of Dione and Dyeus (Zeus) and is thus closely linked to Odysseus. Dionysus is considered “twice born,” “a man with 2 mothers,” “the child of the double door.” These epithets recall the practice of circumcision, whereby a boy gains a new mother in terms of his initiation into the priestly class. Robert Graves reports that “ritual rebirth from a man was a well-known Jewish adoption ceremony, a Hittite borrowing.” The reborn Dionysus was raised as a girl, as was Achilles, a practice which recalls to Graves “the Cretan custom of keeping boys in `darknes' (scotioi), that is to say, in the women’s quarters, unit puberty.” The 2 mothers of Dionysus are Core/Demeter/Aphrodite (Core being the name of Persephone before Persephone is supposedly captured by Hades) and his resurrector, either Athena or Rhea or Zeus. The basic idea here is resurrection: birth, death, rebirth. But there is also a fundamental distinction made between Hera and the remarkably full cast of other Mother Goddess characters. It is Hera alone who instigates the death of Dionysus — out of jealousy over Zeus’s affair with Core/Demeter/Aphrodite. Hera prompts Zeus's prime enemies — the Red/Dionysian Titans — to paint their faces white and tear the horned, serpent-crowned infant Dionysus to pieces.
Hera, you see, holds on to life — specifically her husband Zeus’s life — so strongly that she effectively causes only death. Extremes meet. Hera is so White that she is (merely) Black (in contrast to Black/Baroque). You might say she is death-in-life. Nevertheless, her name is cognate with the richly proto-mythological hara and is further linked to the Sanskrit hira, meaning “band,” and to the Norse Hel, goddess of the dead. But Hera is uniquely in complicity with White/Apollonian reversals, especially the Great Reversal. In the context of the Great Reversal, Hera dominates her complex (White–Red–Black) handmaiden Iris — goddess of the rainbow, she who runs on wind, Zeus's messenger “of the Golden Wings” — who is equivalent to Hermes, the Sun and to Anna Livia Plurabelle. This is a prime sense in which the powerful simpleton is “Hera’s Glory.”
The Romans called Hera/Juno iugalis, “goddess of the yoke.” Remarkably proto-mythological, the Romans depicted Hera/Juno — who is famously jealous of her husband Zeus/Jupiter’s many love affairs — as hanging in the air, her hands tied behind her back, 2 heavy stones tied to her feet, a rope around her neck. This image represents the result of a legendary coup d’etat against Zeus/Jupiter. A consensus had emerged on Olympians according to which Zeus was too proud, too petulant, too nearly tyrannical. Eventually Hera, the chief advocate of this consensus, compelled all the other Olympians — except Hestia — to bind the sleeping Zeus to his couch using rawhide cord and knotting it 100 times. Jeering at the now furious but helpless Zeus, the conspirators predictably fell into disputes as to who should succeed him. But the Nereid Thetis, fearing an Olympian civil war, summoned the 100-handed giant Briareus (“Strong”) —the initial child of Mother Earth, and specifically equivalent to Hercules — to untie all the knots at once (á la Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot). Thus freed, Zeus punished Hera by temporarily hanging her from the sky as described above; and he punished Poseidon and Apollo by forcing them to temporarily serve King Laomedon, for whom they consequently built the walls of Troy (Poseidon did the building, with a little help from Aeacus the Lelegian; while Apollo played the lyre and fed Laomedon’s flocks), which walls are equivalent to the walls of Paradise (from the Avestan pairi.daēza, pairi meaning “around,” and daēza meaning “to heap or pile up”). Zeus asleep on his couch is the sacrificed king dead on his bier, afloat on the river of death. But that king — like Finn, like Joyce’s Humphrey — is dreaming the entire story of humankind and is destined to wake. The river of death is but part of a cycle. The bonds of death are but an aspect of the general boundary, the essence, of all existence, of the Black/Baroque. The cord by which Hera reins in her husband and thus, after the fashion of the Great Reversal, secures his and her own supposedly singular power is the cord that generally signifies the true humility of that power in the literal face of the fractal multiplicity of existence.
But let’s return our attention to Odysseus. As a boy Odysseus/Ulysses is indeed wounded on the thigh by a boar’s “white tusk” during a hunt, which boar he does then kill. The boar is Red, the tusk White. As I will explain, the boar corresponds to Troy, the tusk to Paris. Odysseus/Ulysses is wounded as a child, and he is also wounded by the Trojan War. His famous entry into the wooden horse (a symbol of Poseidon) corresponds to a king’s entry into a tomb, i.e. into an ark, into Cepheus, and likewise into the Pegasus Square. Odysseus/Ulysses henceforth sails the Mediterranean as a sacrificed king.
Or as a keg of beer. An original form of gold, beer is intimately associated with the forest grove. In modern times beer has typically been produced near mills and transported in barrels called “kegs,” which hold 30 gallons. A barrel roughly twice that volume (i.e. approximately 60 gallons) is called a “hogshead.” This term especially recalls the Shaun the Post character — originally from Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue — who features in Finnegans Wake, Book I Chapter VI, and Book III, the latter of which according to Joyce recovers the previous chapters in reverse, “like a postman traveling backwards through the night,” and corresponds as well to the perspective of a barrel — an ark of sorts — rolling down the river Liffey. This is the perspective of the sacrificed king, the self-sacrificed god, the scapegoat, the exile, Poseidon; for following his sacrifice on the World Tree (i.e. post) he is taken to a bog or lake or river or sea and thrown in, and all the “sins,” if you will, of the tribe — or all the demons/ills afflicting the tribe — are washed away with him, posted, as it were, to the netherworld and thus to the original sacrifice, Father Dis, i.e. to Zeus and his consort Dione. Shortly I will explain that the ultimate “river” in this respect is the Milky Way.
For now, let me comment that the name Poseidon, a.k.a. Pontus or Neptune or the P-I-E Neptno, is linked to the Latin pondus, “weight,” and pons, “bridge,” and hence to pontiff, “bridge-maker.” Poseidon, middle brother of Zeus and Hades, is he who commands the area between the sky and the underworld, i.e. the middle ground, the medium, the suspended. He is the self-sacrificing, immanent, monadic, real aspect of God. He is forever and all ways and everywhere being sacrificed, eaten and imbibed — and thrown into the river (or lake, bog, sea), the potamon, which word is related to the Latin potare, “to drink,” potens, “power,” and potis, “able,” as in potent, potential and possible, and to the Greek polis, “city, state,” and polus, “pivot, pole,” and to the Lithuanian pilis, “castle,” and to the Latin bos, “ox, cow,” and to the English post (with its extremely rich set of meanings). H was sometimes called Potidan — perhaps a combination of pot and ida, “wooded mountain” — and he is the male equivalent of the triple-Goddess, whom the Greeks called the Potniae, “powerful ones,” this trinity-in-unity being equivalent to the Latin Ops (as in Eur–Op, “red face,” “heather face,” “broad face,” “bovine face”), whose name means “power” and “plenty” and “face,” as in the face of Medusa, of Kolyo, of Kali, of Tara (“scarer”), of Humbaba, of the Green Woman–Man, etc. As I intimated earlier in this chapter, the name Poseidon is linked to bees via Apis, the Greek name for ancient Egypt’s most divine, bull-like god: Hapi or Hap or Hp, who is equivalent to their human-like god of the Nile. The actual bull representative of Hp was chosen as a youngster for its black color and for the white crescent mark on its neck; it was sacrificed when 25 years old, mummified with as much care as if it were a pharaoh, and entombed in a granite sarcophagus in the Serapeum at Saqqara. The name Hp coupled to the bovine and to the river god calls to mind the Greek word hippos, “horse.” Horses were considered both Poseidon’s and Hera’s sacred domestic animal. But our analysis here suggests that bovines, domesticated long before horses, likewise preceded horses in this symbolic respect. By the same line of reasoning we might say that sows and, earlier yet, dogs were the sacred domestic animal of such god, who represents the hero in general, specifically the Father aspect of the self-sacrificing entity. The same can be said of Poseidon’s female counterpart/aspect: the Lady of the Lake, Kolyo, Demeter, the Green Woman, etc.
Getting back to Joyce's barrel/kegs, note that kegs are these day made of metal but were of course originally made of wood, by coopers. The noun cooper comes from the Greek kypellon, “cup,” and from the Latin cupa, meaning “cup, tub.” These words are related to copper, which gets its name from the Mediterranean island Cyprus (Greek Kyprus, Assyrian Kipar), where copper was extremely abundant. Copper is the original metal used by humans and therefore it is Red/Dionysian relative to other metals. But likewise copper represents all metals. And metal in general is White/Apollonian relative to water, wood, earth, rock, etc. Now, cooper and copper are furthermore related to hive, for hive stems from the Old Norse hufr, meaning “ship’s hull” — and which word is linked to the Old High German huf, “hip,” and huof, “hoof,” as in Hp and horse and Poseidon! (or horse and Tristan/Lancelot in boat/cup!) — and from the Sanskrit, kupa, “cave.” (In the Iliad Homer describes certain troops as being “thick as bees that issue from a crevice in a rock face.” Again Delphi comes to mind.) Interestingly, the Arabic kufr means “unbelievers.” Insofar as this word kufr is cognate with hufr, we seem to have a distinction between the hull of a ship and the keel. For as we will learn, the keel corresponds to the Red/Dionysian stylus, spear, sword, saw, soul, etc., as well as to the Tree of Life, the cross, beetles (Coleoptera), the sternum, the archer’s bow, urine, and Orion. The hull, on the other hand, corresponds to the keg, cup, hive, hide, skin, cube, ribs, temple, home, and body. Husk-like, skin-like, shell-like entities are dominantly White/Apollonian, containers in contrast to contents, physical in contrast to real.
Copper is predominantly White/Appollonian and secondarily — but more importantly — dominantly Red/Dionysian, just like Father Dis, just like Hermes, just like Ares/Mars, just like Janus. And just like Cupid. The name Cupid is cognate with copper and links to the Sumerian ku, meaning — like the Sanskrit anna — “food” and “to base, found, build.” The name stems more directly from the ancient Egyption khu, meaning “a person’s numen, their soul or spirit,” or else “a celestial being who lives with the gods.” All of these meanings have both White/Apollonian and Red/Dionysian connotations.
Importantly, the Egyptians gave the name Khu to the Pleiades, which star cluster they associated with the goddess Nut. Clearly the Pleiades are characterized by the same resonance/suspension remarkable of Hermes, Mars, Janus, and Cupid; they are singular yet multiple. The Egyptians surely recognized Nut, too, as such an entity: below and above (i.e. “the coverer”), old and young, singular and multiple, Black and White (and altogether Black/Baroque), Persephone and Core, Red/Dionysian, Anna Livia Plurabelle.
The word khu also refers to the female genitalia and is cognate with our words cut, cutaneous (from the Latin cutis, “skin”), cuticle, cute, cube, quarry (from the Middle French cuir, “skin, hide,” and akin to the Old French quarre, “squared stone,” as in a cubic ark, the Ka’aba, and the Pegasus Square), concupiscence, concubine, cupidity, covet, cuneiform (meaning “wedge-shaped,” as in the letter A and the delta symbol), cubit and elbow (the Latin cubitum meaning “elbow,” as in the characteristically loose skin of an elbow).
Joyce in the Wake presents myriad references to elbows. He is more famous, however, for his scatological references. Indeed another word closely linked to the whole copper complex is the root copro- or copr-, from the Greek kopros, “dung, feces.” Anna is associated with the herm, the primal mound, the pile of dung, and with food. As such, the name Anna — stemming from the Greek ana, “up, back, again” — is a rather perfect contronym, especially since it is a palindrome (which word palindrome is closely linked to the Greak polos, “axis, pole”). Anna is Hermes. Anna is Cupid. Anna is Humphrey. Anna is Zeus, Anna is Demeter. Anna is Dione (Diana). Anna is Dana (Danann). Hera is Anna reduced from White–Red–Black (i.e. triple-Goddess) to a deathly Black (or White) singularity.
In this respect I’m reminded of an account offered by Roger Penrose in his Emperor’s New Mind. The account calls to mind both Hamilton’s aforementioned discovery of the quaternion equations and the Irish name of Dublin, Baile Átha Cliath, “Place of the Ford of the Hurdles.” Penrose:
In the autumn of 1964, I had been worrying about the problem of black hole singularities … A colleague (Ivor Robinson) had been visiting from the USA and he was engaging me in voluble conversation on a quite different topic as we walked down the street approaching my office in Birbeck College in London . The conversation stopped momentarily as we crossed a side road, and resumed again at the other side. Evidently, during those few moments, an idea occurred to me, but then the ensuing conversation blotted it from my mind!
Later in the day, after my colleague had left, I returned to my office. I remember having an odd feeling of elation that I could not account for. I began going through in my mind all the various things that had happened to me during the day, in an attempt to find what it was that had caused this elation. After eliminating numerous inadequate possibilities, I finally brought to mind the thought that I had had while crossing the street — a thought which had momentarily elated me by providing the solution to the problem that had been milling around at the back of my head! Apparently, it was the needed crit