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 criterion — that I subsequently called a “trapped surface” — and then it did not take me long to form the outline of a proof of the theorem that I had been looking for (Penrose 1965). Even so, it was some while before the proof was formulated in a completely rigorous way, but the idea that I had had while crossing the street had been the key.
I wonder whether Penrose remembers the name of that side road….
And so we’ve cycled from Haran to Hera, from the tip of the pyramid to the (all too simple) notion of a black hole. Let’s now begin another such cycle by addressing the next appearance of Haran in biblical lore. We don’t have to search far in this regard, for Haran features in the aforementioned story of Abraham’s grandson Jacob.
Jacob is the youngest son of Isaac, who is the youngest son of Abraham. The name Isaac means “laughter” or “he who laughs.” He is the male equivalent of Joyce’s Issy; i.e. Joyce’s Shaun. In a word, Isaac is symbolic of the White/Apollonian — although he is of course destined to become Red/Dionysian. Abraham, after the fashion of the Great Reversal, is said to favor Isaac over Isaac’s elder half-brother Ishmael. Likewise Isaac effectively favors Jacob (Israel) over Jacob’s elder twin brother Esau. Similarly Perez (or Pharez; equivalent to Paris) is favored over Zerah (who has a scarlet thread on his hand); and Ephraim is favored over Manasseh.
Isaac and Ishmael are said to have different mothers from different classes, upper and lower, respectively. Sarai, mother of Isaac, pressures Abraham to cast out Ishmael and the boy’s mother, Hagar. Yahweh consoles the troubled Abraham in this respect: “Be not displeased because of the lad and because of your slave woman [Hagar]; whatever Sarai says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your descendents be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” Abraham reluctantly subscribes to the plan and escorts Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, where he leaves them to their fate. Mother and son are alone and near death in the wilderness when at last the voice of “the angel of the Lord” — supposedly Gabriel, a Hermes type — consoles them and leads Hagar to a nearby well. The “angel” then extends a promise from Yahweh: “I will make him [Ishmael] a great nation.” Yahweh in turn watches over the boy as he matures in the wilderness. Ishmael — whose name means “he who hears” or “he who heeds” — becomes in the wilderness an expert archer.
The motifs in the story of Ishmael — lowness of birth, life in the wilderness, hearing rather than seeing, archery (and hunting in general) — these, along with seniority, redness, hirsuteness, and life in hilly or mountainous country, are primary motifs attaching to the proto-mythological and likewise to the dominantly Red/Dionysian figure. The “great nation” that Yahweh promises of Ishmael is the nation the Arabs expect to fashion. And according to Islam, the well to which Gabriel/Hermes leads Hagar is the Well of Zamzam, located within Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram.
The discord between Jacob and Esau is rather more poignant, for the boys are twins maturing in the same kingly line. When these brothers are still in Rebekah’s womb, Yahweh says to her: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” Isaac is 60 years old when these twins were born. The eldest “came forth red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they called his name Esau.” Esau becomes a great hunter. “Isaac loved Esau, for he ate of his game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.” The name Rebekah derives from the Hebrew ribbqáh, “noose,” which stems from rabak, “to bind, to tie.” Here is good old Kolyo, the Mother, “the coverer.” As I will repeatedly expound, Kolyo proto-mythologically favors the younger and more beautiful man over the aged and ugly.
After Jacob convinces Esau to sell him the birthright, and after Isaac grows old and nearly blind, Rebekah schemes with Jacob to trick Isaac into giving the father’s most important blessing to Jacob rather than to Esau. Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes and attaches animal skins to his hands and to the smooth part of his neck. She then sends him in to Isaac bearing savory foods from the hunt. Isaac senses that the voice of this visitor is not Esau’s, but he allows himself to dismiss this concern and gives said blessing to the imposter.
Esau of course is infuriated at this transgression. Indeed, he now plans to kill Jacob. Rebekah therefore schemes to send Jacob temporarily to the safety of her brother Laban (or Leban, which name is significant of the proto-mythological, being cognate with ligature, legal, legacy, legend, left, etc.) in her home town of — you got it — Haran. (The word left, as I indicated, is from the Old English weak. It is akin to the Middle Low German lucht, “left,” which is akin to the Latin lucere, “to shine,” as well as lucus and the names Lucifer, Luna, Dyeus, etc.) Insofar as the Habiru in fact emerged out of the Hurrians rather than the Canaanites, Rebekah is sending Jacob to (or at least toward) the original homeland of the Hebrews. She complains to Isaac that the local Canaanite women are tiresome and that she cannot accept a marriage between Jacob and such a woman. Isaac is thus tricked again. He sends Jacob abroad to find a wife. When in turn Esau learns that the local women do not please Isaac, he too travels abroad to find a wife. Significantly, Esau goes to none other than Ishmael in this respect and succeeds in marrying Ishmael’s daughter Mahalath. Eventually Yahweh grants to Esau the hill country of Seir. (Note the Se- prefix.)
Meanwhile Jacob is on his lonely way to Haran. One night he sleeps under the stars , using a stone as a pillow. He dreams of a ladder (Greek klima) “set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!” Yahweh stands atop the ladder and says to Jacob:
… the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendents; and your descendents shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and by you and your descendents shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done that which I have spoken to you.
Upon waking, Jacob takes the stone pillow, sets it up as a pillar, and pours oil over it. He then names the place Bethel, meaning “The House of God” — although the indigenous name of the place is Luz, which name smacks of lucus and likewise of Lucifer, Luna, Dyeus, Deus, Zeus, Dione, Demeter, Diana, Dana, Dionysus, Odysseus/Ulysses, Father Dis, and the Irish Finn. Here, then, we have a house, an enclosure — á la the Pegasus Square — referencing a native sacred place, a garden, an ara, a hara, a haram, a paradise. Bethel doubly underwrites the place and time of sacrifice: Haran. As such, Bethel moreover corresponds to the World Tree (ladder) that punctuates this quantum moment. The “angels” ascending and descending the ladder in Jacob’s dream are the limitless manifestations of the hero, all the Finns, Hercules–Cepheuses, all the Phoenixes, forever (and in every moment) rising and falling, forever (and in every moment) realizing the complex, Black/Baroque nature of gravity, of existence. Jacob, with his head on the stone, is a particular manifestation of the hero. He ascends the tree to Haran and he will descend again to Canaan — i.e. to the promised land, the land of destiny, the land of Father Dis. In the process Jacob will be transformed from White/Apollonian to Red/Dionysian.
Jacob (Jaakov in Hebrew; i.e. Jaa–Kov, Ja–Ov) is St. George (Ge–Org) is Gilgamesh (Gilga–Mesh) is James (Ja–Mes) is White–Red is multiple–singular is freedom–destiny. The Sumerian root gi —equivalent to ja, ya, yi, ga, ge, je, jo, etc. — means not only “young man” but also “small and thin like a reed” and “to reject, dislike; to return, come back, send; to answer, restore.” The closely related Hebrew word gilgal is linked to the Hebrew galal, “to roll,” and refers to circles, springs, caves, eminences, and standing stones (especially circular constellations thereof). According to Joshua 4:3–24, Yahweh commands Joshua to take 12 stones from the river Jordan and stand them up at Gilgal. “When your children ask their fathers in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’” It is at Gilgal that the new Hebrew generation — the generation that emerged from the 40 years in the wilderness, which ordeal killed the previous generation entirely — is circumcised (Joshua 5:1–7). Saul, the initial king of the Hebrews, is crowned at this “high place” (1^st Samuel 9–11). Gilgal is also where Samuel announces Saul’s fall from the kingship. Samuel thereupon anoints David — player of the lyre, á la Tristan — Saul’s successor, at which point “an evil spirit from the Lord” torments Saul. Gilgal is equivalent to Haran.
By the way, the title Finnegans Wake stems from an Irish ballad about a hod-carrier — i.e. a mason, for a hod is a tray or trough supported with a pole handle and borne on the shoulder to carry loads of brick and mortar — who falls from, yes, a ladder to what is presumed his death but is revived by the smell of the whiskey at his wake.
The marriage arrangements that confront Jacob in Haran are further symbols of proto-mythology. Jacob falls in love with Laban’s youngest daughter, Rachel (whom Jacob initially meets, and significantly so, at a great well outside Haran), rather than the eldest daughter, Leah (who like most dominantly Red/Dionysian figures is weak of eyesight). Jacob agrees to spend 7 years serving Laban in order to marry Rachel. He does his time. But at the end of it Laban insists that Jacob marry Leah (whose name, like Laban’s, is cognate with ligature, legal, etc.). Laban does allow that Jacob may marry Rachel, but only on condition: Jacob must agree to serve Laban for another 7 years; the marriage to Rachel may occur upon the end of that servitude. True to his dominantly Red/Dionysian, trickster nature, Laban has fooled Jacob. (Likewise Jacob had to embellish himself with Red/Dionysian motifs to fool Isaac.)
Jacob accepts said onerous condition, marries Leah, does his 7 years, and finally marries Rachel. Leah bears 4 sons to Jacob: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Rachel, on the other hand, is barren. Rachel therefore gives her maid Bilhah to Jacob as a wife. Bilhah bears 2 sons to Jacob: Dan and Naphtali. Likewise Leah gives her maid Zilpah to Jacob. Zilpah bears 2 sons to Jacob: Gad and Asher. Leah, herself, becomes pregnant 3 more times, giving birth to Jacob’s sons Issachar and Zebulum and to his daughter Dinah. Thus Leah bears 6 sons and 1 daughter to Jacob; and the maids altogether bear 4 sons to him. Finally Yahweh allows Rachel to become pregnant and she bears Jacob’s 11^th son: Joseph. (Eventually, in Canaan, Rachel will give birth to Jacob’s 12^th son: Benjamin, which name means “son of the right hand” and “son of the south.” These characteristics are symbolic of the White/Apollonian.)
Jacob finally expresses his strong desire to return home to Canaan. Laban resists: “I have learned by divination that the Lord has blessed me because of you; name your wages and I will give it.” Jacob therefore strikes a bargain with Laban. But again Laban cheats him. In turn Yahweh’s messenger angel visits Jacob in a dream and tells him to flee with his family to Canaan. Jacob heeds the admonition. Rachel, before leaving, steals Laban’s (proto-mythological) household gods. Laban, upon learning of Jacob’s flight, gives chase, catches up and confronts the family. But Yahweh has spoken to Laban, too, telling him to act peacefully toward Jacob. Therefore Laban suggests to Jacob that they make a covenant. Jacob agrees and again sets up a stone pillar to mark the occasion, moreover telling his kinsfolk to gather stones and to make of heap of them. Laban names this heap — i.e. this herm — Galeed, and the pillar he names Mizpah. “This heap is a witness, and the pillar is a witness,” he exclaims, “that I will not pass over this heap to you, and you will not pass over this heap to me, for harm.”
This Galeed is considered by many the source of the name Galahad. Escorted by an old hermit and wearing either a red robe or red armor, Galahad arrives at Arthur’s court and unwittingly sits in the perilous 13th seat of the Round Table, which seat corresponds to Judas Iscariot and has been reserved for the knight who will find the Holy Grail (“blood-red” Sangreal). Any other person who sits upon that seat will be immediately swallowed by the Earth. King Arthur is astounded at Galahad’s survival. The hermit explains that Galahad — being the son of Sir Lancelot du Lac and Elaine of Corbenic, daughter of King Pelles — is of King David’s line and is kin to Joseph of Arimathea. Arthur in turn tests Galahad’s capacity in regard to the Grail by commanding the young man to remove a certain sword stuck in a stone (á la Arthur and Excalibur). Galahad performs the task with utter facility, and Arthur therefore proclaims him the greatest knight in the world and officially asks him to join the Round Table. Thus the Grail Quest begins. Galahad’s unique capacity is attributed to his purity and especially to his humbleness.
The story of the biblical patriarchs can be mapped as follows:

And this map corresponds to the following map of the Arthur legend, which map depends especially on the simple and reasonable device of considering Lancelot and Guinevere a generation younger than Arthur, with Lancelot essentially in the role of Arthur's own son:

Note in this connection the following. The names Igraine, Guinevere and Columba all mean “white spirit.” The name Morgan is cognate with the Latin mors, “death.” The names Leah and Elaine are cognate. The epithet Pendragon (or Bendragon) means “head of the dragon.” Aided by Merlin, Uther disguises himself as Gorlois to sleep with Igraine. Here we see the proto-mythological notion according to which the younger, dashing man replaces the aging, elderly man, who in this respect has essentially already been sacrificed (by time itself) and inasmuch is considered a (Red/Dionysian) dragon. The name Gorlois is cognate with the Greek Gorgon (“ugly”), the Latin gurges (“whirlpool”), and the Old English gar (“spear,” as in the sacrificial weapon and the priestly staff). Proto-mythologically the woman is always (sexually) attracted to or merely favoring the (dominantly White/Apollonian) younger man/son. Thus Rebekah favors Isaac, Igraine is attracted to Uther Pendragon, Guinevere is attracted to Lancelot, and Iseult is attracted to Tristan. Contrastingly the likes of Isaac, Gorlois, Arthur, and Mark — i.e. the aged king — favor the eldest son and generally the priestly, womanly man; this because such dominantly Red/Dionysian type is not a threat to usurp the kingly power. The young son/man is sent abroad to usurp some other king’s power and inasmuch to extend the father’s power; or else such young man is sacrificed in the king’s stead…. The Lady of the Lake is Black/Baroque Kolyo, a.k.a. Kalypso, Kali (“The Black One”), Nut, etc.; she is “the coverer,” Woman in general. The word lake stems from the Greek lakkos, “pond,” i.e. pound, enclosure. Merlin and Kay (a.k.a. Cai, Cei) are both magicians, shape-shifters, Red/Dionysian, already sacrificed.
Merlin’s early life is especially interesting in this last regard. According to legend, the Britons were told that a certain great fortress they had built would never be safe until its ground had received the blood of a child who had no mortal father. Eventually a beautiful girl became pregnant by a demon. This child — Merlin — therefore sufficed to be the requisite sacrifice; but somehow Merlin avoided the blade and went on to his great career. Merlin loves the Lady of the Lake (a.k.a. Viviane, Eviene, Nimue, Nina, etc.), despite the fact that she is disinterested in him. In attempting to understand her, Merlin effectively disqualifies himself from her love. Thus he is bound in an enchanted wood by his own nature, i.e. by his own destiny. (Recall my adage: You can understand only what you cannot control, and you can control only what you cannot understand.) “I am the greatest fool,” Merlin comments. “For I love another more than I love myself, and I taught my beloved how to bind me to herself, and now no one can save me.”
The Lady of the Lake is existence in general. Perhaps only Galahad is capable of loving Her no more than himself; for She may be understood in terms of the Holy Grail only, i.e. the true absolute, the best symbol/container of the Black/Baroque; and only Galahad sees the Holy Grail distinctly. All who fall short of this absolute, Merlin included, are essentially overwhelmed by Kolyo.

The Beguiling of Merlin, E. Burne Jones (c. 1870–74 CE).
Note the snakes on Viviane’s head.

I’m reminded of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Here’s an extremely famous and apt passage from that poem, tapped by Fitzgerald for the title Tender is the Night, which novel features the hero Dick Diver.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
Cepheus (from the Aramaic Qepha, meaning “rock”) is Isaac is Saul is King Arthur is King Mark is Finn Mac Cumhal; and these latter 5 correspond respectively to Jacob, David, Lancelot, Tristan, and Diarmuid. Cepheus is at once stone and sword and hero. He is the once and future king. The Galeed is the World Tree rising from the Pegasus Square to the tip of Cepheus. The pillar Mizpah is the Tree of Knowledge rising from the constellation Hercules — i.e. from the inchoate, incipient state of the hero — to Haran, i.e. to the finger, as it were, of Upuat and thus to the age/moment of sacrifice, which singularly prime mythological moment Michelangelo famously depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The word inchoate is especially apt in the previous paragraph, for it stems from the Latin cohum, meaning “the part of a yoke to which the beam of a plow is fitted.” The yoke is the simplified, miserable, White–Black Hera, “goddess of the yoke,” and her glory Hercules. She contrasts with her proto-form, the White–Red–Black goddess, i.e. the triple-Goddess, the tree-Goddess, the Green Woman, which triune, singularly elemental character corresponds to yoke–cohum–beam and especially to the cohum, i.e. to the connection, i.e. to he or she who hangs on the (rising) tree whilst being bound to death (falling). Likewise the triple-God–Goddess corresponds to the famous knot which legend says was tied by the childless King Gordius. According to an oracle, whoever untied the knot would rule Asia. Gordium, the city purportedly founded by Gordius, was in fact the key to Asia Minor insofar as the city’s location uniquely mediated the singularly prime trade route between Antioch and Troy. The Macedonian Alexander the Great famously cut the Gordian knot on his way into the Middle East. That knot and that city correspond precisely to the Red/Dionysian and what’s more to the mystery of existence in general: the Black/Baroque. This recognition is the key to the Orient, i.e. the key to the East, to rebirth, indeed to the nature of God. Sure enough, Gordius adopted King Midas and made him heir to Gordium. Succeeding to that throne, Midas promoted the worship of Dionysus. Midas was the son of the Great Goddess of Ida (i.e. of the Mountain), by a satyr whose name is lost to us. Originally a pleasure-loving king of Macedonian Bromium, Midas had there planted marvelous rose gardens and ruled over the Brigians. One day the satyr Silenus was discovered in these rose gardens, sleeping off a hangover. Brought before Midas, Silenus enthralled the young king with tales about a lost continent — which was home to a virtually utopian civilization that featured a marvelous legal system — and about other wonders, including a terrible whirlpool no person can navigate beyond yet nearby which a pair of streams flow, each marked by a singular riparian tree, one of which bears fruit that causes premature aging and death and the other of which bears fruit that causes the reverse process: infantilization to the point of complete disappearance! Dionysus himself, thankful to Midas for recovering and hosting Silenus, asked the young king to name a reward. Midas famously asked that all he henceforth touch be turned to gold. On the instructions of Dionysus, Midas was able to purify himself of this blessed curse by bathing in the source of a certain river. Eventually Midas witnessed the famous musical contest between Marsyas and Apollo. The river-god Tmolus umpired that contest, naming Apollo the victor. When Midas — true to his Red/Dionysian character and Golden/Legal philosophy — objected to this ruling, Tmolus transformed Midas’s ears into those of an ass (such as characterize the Egyptian god Set).
According to my understanding the universe is not best determined by model, i.e. by an essentially unlimited configuration space nor by any concept, but rather by the best symbol of the principle of relativity. The best such symbol signifies an unlimited number of related souls; but this relativity is neither in space nor in time, i.e. it is in terms neither of space nor of time; it is outside space and time; or, better still, space and time are outside it; for it is the basis of space and time. Newton’s chief hypothesis is ultimately not correct; there is a certain absolute verticality to intelligence, a certain absolute hierarchy to the universe. If there were not, then we should expect, as Enrico Fermi famously said, that we would already be confronted by things significant of extraterrestrial intelligence. “If they [i.e., intelligent extraterrestrials] existed, they would be here,” Fermi said. This is Fermi’s Paradox. Indeed, according to proto-mythology we should expect the universe apart from Earth to be dead; Earth is the center of the universe; existence in general expresses itself in terms of this center. To be sure, the ladder does reach to heaven, and there are angels all along it; but the fundamental ladder is rooted on the Earth. The universe is extremely inchoate. Distance is hierarchical. Distance is the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is both space and light. All (physical) being is light. And light is significant of all reality, i.e. it is significantly the set of monads, the matrix. This is the sense in which the aliens, the others, are already here.
Consider in this light the following conversation from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream V, I:
THESEUS:
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antick fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact: —
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, —
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
HIPPOLYTA (Queen of the Amazons):
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
I’ve strayed from the story of Jacob, and there remains a bit more of it to tell. Leaving Laban, the Galeed and the Mizpah, Jacob continues toward Canaan. He sends word ahead to his Red/Dionysian brother Esau in Seir, telling him about the sojourn in Haran, offering him a great gift of livestock and such, and saying that he, Jacob, is Esau’s servant and is looking to find favor in Esau’s eyes. In turn Jacob learns that Esau is indeed coming to meet him but that he is bringing 400 men. Afraid of Esau and this veritable army, Jacob divides his group into 2 companies and furthermore spends the night alone as a sort of diversion. That night a very odd thing happens to Jacob, yet it is described in a remarkably matter-of-fact way:
And Jacob was left alone; a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
Jacob has been wounded by Yahweh, precisely as Ulysses (“Wounded Thigh”) was wounded on the thigh by a (Red/Dionysian) wild boar’s [W]hite tusk. Jacob has thus been completed, sacrificed, as it were; he has become dominantly Red/Dionysian, equivalent to Cepheus, Father Dis, Deus, Dyeus, Zeus — equivalent to Yahweh. The story honors this completion in terms of the name Israel: Isra-El, Is–Ra of El; male–female of God; male–female of Yahweh. Jacob — predominantly White/Apollonian, Moon-like— has become like the Sun: a feminine man, complex, Red/Dionysian.
When Esau arrives later that day, he runs to meet Jacob, embraces him, kisses him, and weeps. Thus the twin brothers are again united. Like a total eclipse of the Sun, the pair is a multeity-in-unity, a complex, quantum-gravitational singularity. The wrestling match which leads to this reunion corresponds to the relation between (the constellations and characters) Hercules and Bootes. Jacob’s completion as Israel corresponds to Ursa Major. Jacob’s union with Esau corresponds to Polaris.
In re-uniting with Esau, Jacob — Israel — also unites with Ishmael, Abraham, and Adam. The Pegasus Square corresponds to Golgotha (Latin Calvary), “Hill of the Skull,” legendary burial place of Adam. Hercules and the Ka’aba correspond to the Pegasus Square. Thus the Ka’aba, most holy place in the Muslim world, corresponds to Cross. Ironically, the pilgrim arriving at the Masjid al-Haram, circling the Ka’aba 7 times in the counter-clockwise direction, and performing the other rituals of the Hajj is akin to Jacob becoming Israel and to Jesus becoming Christ.

According to Islam, Adam originally built the Ka’aba as a replica of Allah’s house in Heaven. Abraham and his son Ishmael rebuilt the Ka’aba after it had been destroyed by the Great Flood (11 generations previous). In the process of this reconstruction the Ka’aba came to contain as its southeast cornerstone what is now called the Black Stone of Islam. The stone is reddish black with some red and yellow particles — although it is said to have been white when it fell there from the sky, a gift to Abraham from the angel Gabriel (again, “Yahweh’s messenger angel,” he who supposedly delivered the revelations to Mohammed).
Chances are the Black Stone is a tektite. Generally tektites are a special kind of glass — exceptionally pure in that it is largely free of water, crystallites and volatiles. Some tektites contain microscopic Ni–Fe spheroids; but even such iron-bearing tektites are virtually non-magnetic, owing to the fact that an object may have a macroscopic magnetic field only insofar as the object’s substance is crystalline. Tektites have a variously dark, greenish-brownish-olive-to-emerald-green-golden-amber-brown-to straw-yellow color. Most experts think that tektites are formed when large extraterrestrial objects slam into the Earth. Such collisions melt terrestrial rocks into this special type of glass. According to proto-mythology, tektites are magical tools akin to the priest’s sacrificial sword, to his stylus (pen), and likewise akin to the Tree and to the base from which it springs. In Sanskrit tektites are called agni Mani, “fire of Mani,” i.e. “fire of (P-I-E) Manu,” “fire of the high priest.” Tibetan lamas and monks think that tektites come from the Osiris–Orion constellation. This constellation represents the complex, proto-mythological, White–Red–Black hero. The early Semitic word for tektite is baetyl, which means “House of God.” The relation to the name Bethel is unmistakable.
According to this analysis Allah is White–Red–Black, a member — albeit the single greatest member — of the Black/Baroque. Insofar as we indulge in the mere metaphor according to which Allah is the Creator of the universe, we should consider Him a fallen god, a god of the world and underworld as well as the overworld.
The precise location of the Ka’aba is no mere chance (i.e. White/Apollonian) coincidence but a destined (Red/Dionysian) coincidence. “The Cube” sits precisely below Haran. It’s as if the Black Stone fell there from Haran. Haran is located at longitude 39° 5´ East while the Masjid al-Haram and the Ka’aba within it sits at 39° 49´ East. Furthermore, the Ark of the Covenant — another rectangular container, this one supposedly containing the priestly tool which is Yahweh’s law — is commonly believed stored in a Christian church in Aksum, Ethiopia, which is located at longitude 38° 72´ East, just across the Red Sea from Mecca.

There is yet another place in the Middle East that corresponds to the Pegasus Square: Phoenicia, and especially its oldest city, Byblos, founded by the great god El. The king of Byblos is Cepheus — whose name means “the gardener” as well as “the rock.” Located on the coast, Byblos is almost directly on the route from Canaan to Haran. The city was a center for the worship of Tammuz (Tâ-uz), which god is equivalent to Hermes, the Phoenix, Finn, Cupid, Jacob, Osiris, Odin, Adonis (“Lord”), Jesus, etc. The coast of Phoenicia is where Osiris’s sarcophagus washes ashore, a giant tamarisk tree immediately growing around it and raising it up toward the heavens. That tamarisk is the World Tree; it terminates in the constellation Cepheus, the tip of which marks the moment when the sacrificed king/hero enters the cube/tomb/ark/home/sleep and becomes dominantly Red/Dionysian. Cepheus is at once tomb and soul, body and mind, hull and keel. He is a ship of sorts, an ark, a ferry (Sanskrit yana). He is tree and man become one. He is the Green Man, the Wild Man. Ferry and man are identical. There is no yonder shore, no shore at all, save the mere concept of shore. And the Great Ferry, the Maha Yana, is not singular; it is a multeity-in-unity, the set of all monads, all heroes.
The Phoenicians were Canaanites. It was the Greeks who named the northern coastal Canaanites “Phoenicians,” which name means “red” or “purple.” The southern coastal Canaanites were called Philistines (as in the name Phyllis, “leafy”) or Purestati (“men of red”), this redness being related to the words estate, state, the Greek histasthai, “to stand, be standing,” and hence to (phallic) Hermes and to history (from the Greek istōr, “knowing, learned”). The word cana’ani in Hebrew means “merchant” — as in Hermes, god of merchants. The Akkadian word kinahhu refers to the red wool which was famously a prime export of Canaan in general. The Greek word cinyra and the Semitic kinnor, both meaning “lyre,” seem ironically cognate with kinahhu. The lyre, as we will learn, is symbolic of the White/Apollonian whereas the pipe (flute) is symbolic of the Red/Dionysian. But the lyre player eventually “pays the piper his due” and is thus transformed from White to Red. Another cognate in this respect is the name Cinyras. King Cinyras of Cyprus is father of Tammuz (Adonis), a.k.a. Osiris, Jacob, etc.; and as Frazer points out, this father and son are essentially equivalent. The flower of Tammuz/Adonis is the (red) anemone. Also called windflower, the anemone probably gets its name from the Semitic word naamen, “darling.” Here again is Noman: Odysseus/Ulysses, Everyman, HCE. Regarding the festival of Tammuz/Adonis, here’s Frazer (with my comments in brackets) from his Golden Bough:
This Phoenician festival appears to have been vernal, for its date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis, and this has been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring. At that season the red earth washed down from the mountains by the rain tinges the water of the river, and even the sea, for a great way with a blood-red hue, and the crimson stain was believed to be the blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; and as the anemone blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be thought to show that the festival of Adonis, or at least one of his festivals, was held in spring. The name of the flower is probably derived from Naamen (“darling”), which seems to have been an epithet of Adonis. The Arabs still call the anemone “wounds of the Naamen.” The red rose also was said to owe its hue to the same sad occasion; for Aphrodite, hastening to her wounded lover, trod on a bush of white roses; the cruel thorns tore her tender flesh, and her sacred blood dyed the white roses for ever red. …
It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the corn-god, who was then either perishing under the sickles of the reapers, or being trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on the threshing floor. [And, in turn, crushed under the stones of the miller. Bones were likewise ground into fertilizer. These bones were equated with the bones of Tammuz. Hence Robert Burns’s famous poem about John Barleycorn.] While the men slew him, the women wept crocodile tears at home to appease his natural indignation by a show of grief for his death. The theory fits well with the dates of the festivals, which fell in spring or summer; for spring and summer, not autumn, are the seasons of the barley and wheat harvests in the lands which worshipped Adonis.
Nevertheless, the festival of Adonis is proto-mythologically rooted in the autumn. In the natural cycles of wild plants and animals, maturity is overwhelming located upon the autumn. Moreover, the original domesticated animals were not genetically modified but merely environmentally modified. Which is to say, the most simple form of domestication is the rearing of very young wild animals. In antiquity these young were usually taken from the wild after their mother was killed by hunters. And hunting was most useful and facile — i.e. generally successful — in autumn and early winter. Frazer continues:
Thus interpreted the death of Adonis is not the natural decay of vegetation in general under the summer heat or the winter cold; it is the violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on the field, stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds it to powder in the mill. That this was indeed the principal aspect in which Adonis presented himself in later times to the agricultural peoples of the Levant, may be admitted; but whether from the beginning he had been the corn and nothing but the corn, may be doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the herdsman [Bootes], above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain, offering rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still he may have embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the autumn woods yield to the savage hunter … And year by year, when the trees were deciduous, every Adonis would seem to bleed to death with the red leaves of autumn and to come to life again with the fresh green of spring.
The chief god of the Canaanites was El, equivalent to Humphrey, Father Dis, Deus, Dyeus, Jupiter, etc., and, according to my thesis, equivalent to Yahweh and to Allah as well (which latter is certainly a cognate of El). The name El recrudesces in the name Elohim, which is the name whereby the northern, dominantly Red/Dionysian kingdom of Hebrews — the Kingdom of Israel — referred to its chief god. The name Yahweh is that by which the southern, relatively White/Apollonian kingdom of Hebrews, Judah, referred to its god, this perhaps to distinguish Him from the obviously Red/Dionysian El. The Red/Dionysian, preserver aspect of El is Baal — equivalent to Bel (as in the Celtic Beltane festival), Joyce, Upuat, Saturn, Hermes, Mars, Janus, Galahad, etc.). And Bel is equivalent to Belili, the Sumerian Mother Goddess.
When El was young he went to sea and met 2 women who became his wives: Rohmaya and Asherah (Joyce’s Belle and Issy, Red and White). This pair of wives somehow together gave birth to the twins Shalim and Shachar (Joyce’s Shem and Shaun): god of dusk and god of dawn, respectively. (The name Shalim recrudesces in the name Jerusalem and in the names of David’s sons: Solomon and Absalom.) This family built a sanctuary in the desert and lived there 8 years. El is grey-haired, bearded and wears bull horns upon his helmet. He resides upon Mount Lel, at “the Source of 2 Rivers.” This residence is equivalent to Haran. Below Haran is Mesopotamia, literally (the land) “between rivers,” these being the Euphrates and the Tigris. In Hebrew lore this land is called “Aram of the 2 Rivers.” These 2 Earthly rivers correspond to 2 celestial rivers, to the top and middle levels of the universe (the celestial and the planetary), and to the 2 kinds of planets (the Red/Dionysian kind of the ecliptic and the White/Apollonian kind consisting of comets and meteors).
Phoenicia especially is equivalent to Dublin’s Phoenix Park, finnischce pairc, “brightwaters enclosure,” paradise, the Pegasus Square, as well as Cepheus, Cygnus, Lyra, Hercules — indeed the entire heroic cycle, the cycle of the Phoenix. Consider the following from Finnegans Wake:
Big Maester Finnykin with Phenicia Parkes, lame of his ear and gape of her leg, most correctingly, we beseech you, down their laddercase of nightwatch service and bring them at suntime flush with the nethermost gangrung of their stepchildren, guide them though the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselves, hedge them bothways from all roamers, whose names are ligious, from loss of bearings deliver them; so they may keep to their rights and be ware of duty frees, neolific smith and magdalenian jinnyjones, mandragon mor and weak wiffeyducky, Morionmale and Thrydacianmad, basilisk glorious with his weeniequeenie, tigernack and swansgrace, he as hale as his ardouries, she as verve as her veines; this prime white arsenic with bissemate alloyed, martial sin with peccadily, …
And later, near the very end of the book:
… temtem tamtam, the Phoenician wakes.
Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!
Generally the proto-mythological hero’s path is equivalent to the counter-clockwise northern face of the universal clock. Yet Jacob’s journey is more a south–north journey, vertical, as if he were climbing a ladder. Likewise the line from the Ka’aba to Haran is almost perfectly south–north. As such, we should expect there to be an essentially vertical celestial movement that nevertheless corresponds to said clock face. Sure enough, this movement is remarkably — indeed, extremely — easy to find. Of course it describes an ellipse, but the ellipse has a long axis in the south–north direction and a short axis so tiny in comparison that the movement is altogether rather simply south–north. This movement is an aspect of the universal clock and therefore has the same period as that clock: some 25,776 years — 25,920 years or 26,352 years as the proto-mythologists figured it. I’m referring to the so-called precessional movement of the constellation Osiris–Orion. In the year 2070 CE this constellation will reach its highest elevation relative to the southern horizon as seen from the northern hemisphere. Over the course of the subsequent 12,888 years (12,960 years or 13,176 years as the proto-mythologists computed) it will return to its lowest such elevation. And so on, over and over, presumably forever.
The Osiris–Orion constellation is a prime celestial equivalent of the Phoenix. Osiris is the “fair-faced one of the Nile.” Orion is a giant who can walk through the sea (á la Neptune, *Neptno, Poseidon) with his head above the water (and his body covered with barnacles). Osiris is dismembered by Set. Orion is blinded in a quarrel, but the Sun heals his eyes. In India the Osiris–Orion constellation is known as Kal Purush, the “Time Man.”

The vertical precessional movement of the Osiris–Orion constellation determines the location of the 4 proto-mythological directions — North, South, East, and West — upon the faces of the universal clock. North on the northern face is located at the tip of Ursa Minor, i.e. at Polaris, which corresponds to the precessional high point of Osiris–Orion, the beginning of the Zodiacal age of Aquarius, and Haran. This is to say, North on the northern face of the universal clock is the point on that face seemingly farthest from the geographical north pole. South on said clock face is the location of the celestial north pole when Osiris–Orion is at his precessional low point. As such, South on the northern face of the universal clock is located near the constellation Hercules, at the point on that clock face seemingly farthest from the geographical south pole. Proto-mythological East corresponds to the midway point of Osiris–Orion’s ascent and to the point on said clock face nearest to geographical east, which point is shadowed by Ursa Major. Proto-mythological West corresponds to the midway point of Osiris–Orion’s descent and to the point on said clock face nearest to geographical west, which point is presided over by Cygnus. This directionality — related to but underdetermined by the fact that the Sun sets in the west — is why the mythological island to which a dead king is supposed to travel (Ogygia or Erytheia, for instance, the former from the Greek ogugios, “primeval,” and the latter from the Greek erythros, “red,” likewise the Latin rufus and rubber, as in rubric, ruby, rudimentary and ruddy) is located to the west and south.
It’s fair to say that there are 2 primary celestial movements according to proto-mythology: that of the celestial north pole and that of Osiris–Orion. Joyce in the Wake refers to this pair in reverse order when he writes: “Which route are they going? Why? Angell sitter or Amen Corner, Norwood’s Southwalk or Euston Waste?” Richard Ellmann on Joyce:
He and his wife stayed at the Euston Hotel, which, because it is patronized by people taking the morning boat-train from Euston Station to Holyhead, calls itself ‘The Gateway to Ireland.’ ‘I feel that I am near Number Thirteen platform — the Irish Mail (absit omen!),’ Joyce told a friend. By special permission of the management he was allowed to remain at this hotel, which is intended for transients, indefinitely. Its advantages, he later described to Miss Weaver as ‘732 rooms [the number of pages in the 1^st edition of his Ulysses], 2 wings, liveried porters, chatty meteorologist in the lift, whispering lounge, English breakfast, videlicet, Danish bacon, Irish eggs, American sugar, French milk, Canadian marmalade, Scotch porridge, New Zealand butter, Dutch toast. Mr. E. H. Knight, manager. I met him every morning and wished him good kday, Mr. Knight. He is a very knice man.’
Amen, you see, is the Egyptian equivalent of Father Dis, Jupiter, Zeus, etc.
On the 2nd page of the Wake Joyce writes:
Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tumbles a’buckets clottering down.
The Time Man’s high tide is upon us: 2070 CE, the beginning of the Zodiacal age of Aquarius, the age of multeity-in-unity, of quantum gravity. This high tide corresponds to the autumn of the year. Haran likewise corresponds to the autumn, to the proto-mythological New Year.
In this respect consider the following extended and extremely important outtake from near the end of Frazer’s Golden Bough:
From the foregoing survey we may infer that among the heathen forefathers of the European peoples the most popular and widespread fire-festival of the year was the great celebration of Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day. The coincidence of the festival with the summer solstice can hardly be accidental. Rather we must suppose that our pagan ancestors purposely timed the ceremony of fire on earth to coincide with the arrival of the sun at the highest point of his course in the sky. If that was so, it follows that the old founders of the midsummer rites had observed the solstices or turning-points of the sun’s apparent path in the sky, and that they accordingly regulated their festal calendar to some extent by astronomical considerations.
But while this may be regarded as fairly certain for what we may call the aborigines throughout a large part of the continent, it appears not to have been true of the Celtic peoples who inhabited the Land’s End of Europe, the islands and promontories that stretch out into the Atlantic Ocean on the North-West. The principal fire-festivals of the Celts, which have survived, though in a restricted area and with diminished pomp, to modern times and even to our own day, were seemingly timed without any reference to the position of the sun in the heaven. They were two in number, and fell at an interval of six months, one being celebrated on the eve of May Day and the other on Allhallow Even or Hallowe’en, as it is now commonly called, that is, on the thirty-first of October, the day preceding All Saints’ or Allhallows’ Day. These dates coincide with none of the four great hinges on which the solar year revolves, to wit, the solstices and the equinoxes. Nor do they agree with the principal seasons of the agricultural year, the sowing in spring and the reaping in autumn. For when May Day comes, the seed has long been committed to the earth; and when November opens, the harvest has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the fruit-trees are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast fluttering to the ground. Yet the first of May and the first of November mark turning-points of the year in Europe; the one ushers in the genial heat and the rich vegetation of summer, the other heralds, if it does not share, the cold and barrenness of winter. Now these particular points of the year, as has been well pointed out by a learned and ingenious writer, while they are of comparatively little moment to the European husbandman, do deeply concern the European herdsman; for it is on the approach of summer that he drives his cattle out into the open to crop the fresh grass, and it is on the approach of winter that he leads them back to the safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems not improbable that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at the beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of the year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from the homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early winter. Even in Central Europe, remote from the region now occupied by the Celts, a similar bisection of the year may be clearly traced in the great popularity, on the one hand, of May Day and its Eve (Walpurgis Night), and, on the other hand, of the Feast of All Souls at the beginning of November, which under a thin Christian cloak conceals an ancient pagan festival of the dead. Hence we may conjecture that everywhere throughout Europe the celestial division of the year according to the solstices was preceded by what we may call a terrestrial division of the year according to the beginning of summer and the beginning of winter.
Be that as it may, the two great Celtic festivals of May Day and the first of November or, to be more accurate, the Eves of these two days, closely resemble each other in the manner of their celebration and in the superstitions associated with them, and alike, by the antique character impressed upon both, betray a remote and purely pagan origin. The festival of May Day or Beltane, as the Celts called it, which ushered in summer, has already been described; it remains to give some account of the corresponding festival of Hallowe’en, which announced the arrival of winter.
Of the two feasts Hallowe’en was perhaps of old the more important, since the Celts would seem to have dated the beginning of the year from it rather than from Beltane. In the Isle of Man, one of the fortresses in which the Celtic language and lore longest held out against the siege of the Saxon invaders, the first of November, Old Style, has been regarded as New Year’s day down to recent times. Thus Manx mummers used to go round on Hallowe’en (Old Style), singing, in the Manx language, a sort of Hogmanay song which began “To-night is New Year’s Night, Hogunnaa!” [Note the seeming cognacy between this title Hogunnaa and the names Anna and, especially, Humbaba/Huwawa, the monster with the “face of intestines” in the Epic of Gilgamesh. We will later address this monster in great detail. For now consider that a face of intestines is remarkably similar to the face of the Green Man, especially insofar as myriad representations of the Green Man portray vegetation issuing from his mouth and, in fewer cases, from his eyes.] In ancient Ireland, a new fire used to be kindled every year on Hallowe’en or the Eve of Samhain, and from this sacred flame all the fires in Ireland were rekindled. Such a custom points strongly to Samhain or All Saints’ Day (the first of November) as New Year’s Day; since the annual kindling of a new fire takes place most naturally at the beginning of the year, in order that the blessed influence of the fresh fire may last throughout the whole period of twelve months. Another confirmation of the view that the Celts dated their year from the first of November is furnished by the manifold modes of divination which were commonly resorted to by Celtic peoples on Hallowe’en for the purpose of ascertaining their destiny, especially their fortune in the coming year; for when could these devices for prying into the future be more reasonably put in practice than at the beginning of the year? As a season of omens and auguries Hallowe’en seems to have far surpassed Beltane in the imagination of the Celts; from which we may with some probability infer that they reckoned their year from Hallowe’en rather than Beltane. Another circumstance of great moment which points to the same conclusion is the association of the dead with Hallowe’en. Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided for them in the kitchen or the parlour by their affectionate kinsfolk. It was, perhaps, a natural thought that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside. Did not the lowing kine then troop back from the summer pastures in the forests and on the hills to be fed and cared for in the stalls, while the bleak winds whistled among the swaying boughs and the snow-drifts deepened in the hollows? and could the good-man and the good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the welcome which they gave to the cows?
According to the (White/Apollonian) Zodiac, the autumnal season of sacrifice, the season of se, of unity (sem, sim), of separation, September, is precisely the 7^th 30-day duration since the time of year corresponding to Osiris–Orion’s precessional low point, which low point corresponds to our 21 March. This relation, recall, is why the number 7 is named “seven.” Hence, too, we have “October,” “November,” and “December”: 8, 9, and 10, respectively. On the proto-mythological view, a month is 40 days long. The duration from (but not including) 21 September through 31 October consists of precisely 40 days.
Yes, in accord with the Great Reversal the month was reduced in length from 40 days to 30 days and the New Year was moved from autumn to spring, i.e. from dusk to dawn, from night to day, from mature to virginal, from Red/Dionysian to White/Apollonian, from the prime universal clock faces to the Zodiac. This is why Joyce refers to Ireland as “this two easter island.”
The proto-mythological importance of the root se- calls to mind the Mass of St. Sécaire, as described by Frazer in the Golden Bough.
… Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but the wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no Good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.
Exodus chapter 12 describes the Passover and begins by recounting God’s initial command that the New Year should be moved to the month of Nisan — a.k.a. Aviv, Abib, as in our April: “And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, ‘This month [Nisan] shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.’” (Exodus 12:1:) What is now called the civil or secular calendar — effective from Genesis 1:1 through Exodus 11 — is the old, proto-mythological calendar; it contrasts with the newer, so-called religious calendar, the calendar of the Great Reversal. The 1^st month in the secular calendar is Tishri, which starts in the autumn, in our September. The Jewish Passover festival was initially celebrated in the epochal year 621 BCE, the year when a certain priest of the temple, the father of the future prophet Jeremiah, produced a book which purported to be the book of the laws of Moses. The festival occurs in conjunction with the annual celebration of the resurrection of Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris, etc.
The Golden/Legal tension between proto-mythological 6-ness (with its autumnal New Year) and White/Apollonian 12-ness (with its March New Year) is captured in the 6-pointed, 12-sided sign of Solomon, the star of David, a symbol of rising–falling, White–Red, and, especially in terms of its delta shapes, of the Black/Baroque. This same primal tension exists between the numbers 9 and 12; in fact it inheres in the number 9, which is the average of 6 and 12. Likewise this tension inheres in the number 4, which is 2/3 of 6 and 1/3 of 12. As I showed, both 9 and 4 are associated in terms of the sexagesimal numbering system with the square. A cube is composed of 6 square faces (9 x 6 = 54, a very important number mythologically, as I will later explain; and 4 x 6 = 24) and as such it has 12 edges. Thus the Star of David corresponds to the Ka’aba and likewise to Hercules, the Tree of Knowledge, the Pegasus Square, the Tree of Life — and precisely thus to the case of Golgotha and the crucified Jesus.
Homer’s Odyssey resonates with the tension between 6 and 12 and likewise — and even more so — with the tension between 9 and 12. The emergence of Odysseus (a.k.a. Ulysses) from the Trojan War seems to mark the reformulation of the heroic type in general relative to the Great Reversal. Not only that; it marks the emergence of a new, White/Apollonian type of art: the original stream of consciousness. Robert Fitzgerald: “Homer’s greatest display of virtuosity, it may well be, lay in handing over to his hero his own job, his art as aoidos or singer of tales, for 2,232 lines, a good sixth of The Odyssey, Books IX through XII of the twenty-four.” Books 9 through 12, in which Odysseus tells the Phaiakians (who lived on the island now called Corfu) about his journey from Troy; note the 2232 lines, a number surely not lost on Joyce. After the famous 9-year stalemate in the Trojan War, Odysseus enters the wooden horse (i.e. Cepheus, the tomb, the ark, the cave, the grotto, the cathedral, etc.) and thus brings the war to an end. Hence he sails westward, to Ismaros on the far shore, the coast of the Kikones. I believe this location corresponds to the constellation Hercules. The Kikones kill many of his men, 6 from each of the 12 ships. The party sails away but a storm comes up and forces them to wait it out for a few days. And when they finally come around Malea, the southern point of Greece, the current takes them out to sea — and a wind from the north sends them drifting 9 days to the land of the Lotus Eaters. I believe that Malea and the land of the Lotus Eaters correspond to Polaris, and that likewise the 9 days correspond to a full cosmic cycle. Another such cycle brings them to the land of the Cyclopes, particularly to the cave of Polyphemos, cannibal son of Poseidon. Odysseus blinds Polyphemous with a 6-foot pole, thus earning the hatred of Poseidon. Book 9 ends with Odysseus and his remaining crew escaping from Polyphemos. Next up is the floating island Aiolia (a.k.a. Lipara, among the 7 Aeolian Islands), home to the wind king Aiolos Hippotades and his 6 sons and 6 daughters. Here again, I believe, is Polaris — or more generally the celestial north pole. Aiolos keeps Odysseus a full month to hear the tale of Troy. He then uses a wind to facilitate Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. After 9 days the crew spots the cost of Ithaca, but when they greedily open the leathern bag which Aiolos had given Odysseus, the winds therein escape and blow the travelers back to Aiolia. For 6 days and nights the crew rows away, until they come to Laistrygonia, “that land where daybreak follows dusk,” where they enter “a curious bay with mountain walls of stone to left and right, and reaching far inland” and where they encounter a “stalwart young girl taking her pail to Artakia, the fountain where these people go for water.” This is to say, they arrive on (or in) the west coast of Norway, which is yet another symbol of Polaris. Fleeing the cannibal Viking king, Ulysses and his crew next make landfall on Aeaea, “island of Circe, dire beauty and divine, sister of baleful Aeetes, like him fathered by Helios the light of mortals on Perse, child of the Ocean stream.” Again, we are at Polaris. A 22-man expedition absent Odysseus goes to explore the center of the island. “In the wild wood they found an open glade, around a smooth stone house — the hall of Circe — and wolves and mountain lions lay there, mild in her soft spell, fed on her drug of evil.” Circe transforms all the 22 men but Eurylokhos into swine. We may infer that the wolves and mountains lions are likewise transformed men. In this sense Circe has sacrificed these men. Eurylokhos escapes to inform Odysseus, who then sets out to rescue his men. But Hermes intercepts him and provides him with the magic plant he needs to protect himself against Circe’s magic. Circe recognizes the hero by this antidote. “Odysseus then you are, O great contender, of whom the glittering god with golden wand spoke to me ever, and foretold the black swift ship would carry you from Troy.” Circe returns the men to their human form. The whole gang hangs out with Circe for a bit too long. Eventually Odysseus’s crew reminds their captain of his intent to return home. He therefore asks Circe for his leave, to which request she responds: “Odysseus, master mariner and soldier, you shall not stay here longer against your will; but home you may not go unless you take a strange way round and come to the cold homes of Death and pale Persephone.” Odysseus wakes his men to begin the strange journey via the land of death, which land I believe corresponds to the constellation Hercules. “Among [the men] the youngest was Elpenor — no mainstay in a fight nor very clever — and this one, having climbed on Circe’s roof to taste the cool night, fell asleep with wine. Waked by our morning voices, and the tramp of men below, he started up, but missed his footing on the long steep backward ladder and fell that height headlong.” This death plunge from the ladder corresponds to the river Oceanus running from Polaris to Hercules. Odysseus upon reaching the land of the dead is initially met by none other than Elpenor. “How is this, Elpenor, how could you journey to the western gloom swifter afoot than I in the black lugger?” Elpenor describes his fall from the ladder and makes this request: “When you make sail and put these lodgings of dim Death behind, you will moor ship, I know, upon Aeaea Island; there, O my lord, remember me, I pray, do not abandon me unwept, unburied, to tempt the gods’ wrath, while you sail for home; but fire my corpse, and all the gear I had, and build a cairn for me above the breakers — an unknown sailor’s mark for men to come. Heap up the mound there, and implant upon it the oar I pulled in life with my companions.” Among the many other ghosts Odysseus encounters during this visit is Tityos: “And I saw Tityos, the son of Gaia, lying abandoned over nine square rods of plain. Vultures, hunched above him, left and right, rifling his belly, stabbed into the liver, and he could never push them off.” The last ghost Odysseus encounters is Hercules. “[And then] the ship went leaping toward the stream of Ocean first under oars, then with a following wind.” Thus the party returns to Aeaea and Circe. They bury Elpenor as he had asked. Circe warns them of their next peril: “Square in your ship’s path are Sirens, crying beauty to bewitch men passing by; woe to the innocent who hears that sound! He will not see his lady nor his children in joy, crowding about him, home from sea; the Sirens will sing his mind away on their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones of dead men rotting in a pile beside them and flayed skins shrivel around the spot. Steer wide; keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears with beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest should hear that song. But if you wish to listen, let the men tie you in the lugger, hand and foot, back to the mast, lashed to the mast. The Sirens correspond to the Pegasus Square, with the World Tree/Mast stemming between it and the constellation Cepheus, i.e. Odysseus’s boat. “What then? One of two courses you may take and you yourself must weigh them.” The initial of these courses runs between the Symplegades, the twin, “prowling” rocks. “Only one ocean-going craft, the far-famed Argo, made it [through], sailing from Aeaea; but she, too, would have crashed on the big rocks if Hera had not pulled her through, for love of Jason, her captain.” These rocks correspond to the constellation Hercules. The other course “lies between headlands.” One of these headlands “is a sharp mountain piercing the sky, with stormcloud round the peak.” This is Polaris. “Midway that height, a cavern full of mist opens toward Erebos and evening …; [this] is the den of Scylla.” The serpent Scylla has 6 legs and 12 heads. On the other headland, opposite, grows a great wild fig tree. Charybdis the maelstrom lurks just off shore. This headland corresponds to the constellation Hercules. The course between the headlands corresponds to the straight stretch from Hercules to Polaris, i.e. the ladder Elpenor fell from, Draco, Oceanus. Odysseus chooses the course past Scylla. He loses 6 crew members to the monster but the ship otherwise passes safely onward to the island of the Sun, of Helios, where they put in to a grotto, a sea cave. Here again is Polaris. The crew slaughters several of Helios’s choice cattle, angering the god and prompting Odysseus and crew to sail away. At Helios’s request Zeus blasts the ship with a lightning bolt. All are killed by Odysseus, who drifts toward Charybdis. He leaps for the great fig tree and hangs from it like a bat. Finally he lets go, falls into the flotsam of his ship, and paddles hard to pass Scylla. “Never could I have passed her had not the Father of gods and men, this time, kept me from her eyes. Once through the strait, nine days I drifted in the open sea before I made shore, buoyed up by the gods, upon Ogygia Isle. The dangerous nymph Kalypso lives and sings there, in her beauty, and she received me, loved me.” So ends chapter 12, once again at Polaris. Athena eventually intervenes to free Odysseus. Zeus sends his favorite son Hermes to Kalypso to secure the hero’s release. “But let him have no company,” says Zeus, “gods or men, only a raft that he must lash together, and after twenty days, worn out at sea, he shall make land upon the garden isle, Scheria, of our kinsmen, the Phaiakians. “[A]nd now her ladyship [Kalypso], having given heed to Zeus’s mandate, went to find Odysseus in his stone seat to seaward — tear on tear brimming his eyes.” She sets Odysseus adrift and he eventually reaches the isle of the Phaiakians, where he is cared for by princess Nausikaa. Once again we are at Polaris. Thus the story of Odysseus involves 9 equivalents of Polaris: Troy, the land of the Lotus Eaters, the land of the Cyclopes, Aiolia, Norway, Circe’s isle Aeaea, the island of the Sun, Kalypso’s island Ogygia, and the isle of the Phaiakians. Adding Ismaros, the land of the dead, and the great wild fig tree — all equivalent to the constellation Hercules —makes a total of 12 landfalls prior to Ithaca. Counting Malea as an equivalent of Polaris, and counting Aiolia and Aeaea twice, we have 12 Polaris equivalents before Ithaca.
Curiously, 12 rue de l’Odeon, Paris, was the address of Sylvia Beach’s now famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co. Ms. Beach was the original publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses — his White/Apollonian, daytime book, which he based on the Odyssey — and she initially presented it to the world in the front window of her shop. Joyce, no doubt, considered said address — as well as Ms. Beach’s name and the name of her bookstore — tremendous synchronicities relative to his work.
We’ve discussed the significance attaching to Haran ’s longtitude. Now we are ready to understand the significance of its latitude. That latitude is approximately 37° (36° 51') north — almost exactly the latitude at which the star Canopus is no longer visible on the southern horizon (depending somewhat, of course, on the observer’s altitude) when the Osiris–Orion constellation is at its highest point of the precessional cycle. Canopus, you see, is counterpart to Sirius. Located at the right foot of Osiris–Orion, Sirius is brightest of all stars. Canopus is second brightest. The Egyptian names for Sirius are Sothis, Septet, and Sept — as in September, the season of sacrifice, the proto-mythological New Year. Sirius is likewise considered the god of circumcision. Clearly Sirius represents the high tide of Osiris–Orion’s south–north journey; it corresponds to Polaris and Haran. Canopus represents the low tide; it corresponds to Hercules, the Ka’aba, and moreover to the Pegasus Square and Phoenicia. In ancient Egypt a “canopic jar” preserved the (Red/Dionysian) viscera of a dead person, for burial with the mummy.
Frazer presents the following germane account written in 1881 CE by a Christian missionary among the Yorubas in West Africa: “When a son is born to the king of Oyo, they make a model of the infant’s right foot in clay and keep it in the house of the elders (ogboni). If the king fails to observe the customs of the country, a messenger, without speaking a word, shows him his child’s foot. The king knows what that means. He takes poison and goes to sleep.”
Sirius and Canopus are considered “dog stars.” The name Canopus, cognate with canine, is significant of this relation. Upuat — a.k.a. Wepwawet, the Greek Anoubis, from the Egyptian Anpu, which name stems from the word inpw, which word is related to the English word emperor, which word derives from the Latin in + parare, “to prepare, order” — who guides souls through the mysterious Duat, has the head of a jackal. As the Red/Dionysian planets are the “dogs of Persephone” (i.e. of Aphrodite/Persephone, the Sun), Sirius and Canopus are the dogs of Osiris–Orion. Likewise it’s fair to say that Polaris is the mysterious “fox star” alluded to in many legends. Polaris indeed corresponds to the Norse Fenrir, wolf-son of Loki. When Fenrir breaks his bonds, Ragnarök begins. Dogs are rather generally associated with death, especially with sacrifice. On the Indonesian island of Sumba I witnessed the ritual autumnal sacrifice of a horse and an ox. The horse was slowly strangled with a long rope, but ox's jugular vein was severed and his neck was then hacked through with machetes. Almost as soon as his blood hit the dirt ground, several local dogs rushed in and lapped it up.
Regarding Persephone, I should point out that her name/title consists of phero + phonos, meaning “she who brings destruction.” The Romans called her Proserpina, “fearful one,” which name is closely linked to the Etruscan phersu and to the Greek prosopon, both meaning “mask.” She is Kolyo/Kali. True to Kolyo's richness as complete, triple-Goddess (Maiden–Nymph–Crone), the Athenians also gave to Persephone the title Persephatta, from ptersis + ephapto, “she who mends destruction.” She is the singular yet complex Fate, equivalent to Aphrodite–Hermes. Persephone was originally the maiden Core, daughter of the Mother Goddess Demeter. According to the account which Helios (the Sun, who sees all and is proto-mythologically equivalent to the Mother Goddess) gave to Demeter (i.e. to herself, for Helios is Hel is Helen is Sel is Sol is Swel is Sunna is Sonne is soul is, according to proto-mythology, chiefly female; this in contrast to Sem, Set, Sin, Man, Men, Mond, Mont, Lucifer, Lugos, Lycos, Ulysses, who is chiefly male), Core was picking (red) poppies amongst a herd of swine when the Earth there opened up, swallowed the swine, and then immediately admitted into its depths an onrushing chariot pulled by 4 black horses and commanded by a driver whose face was hidden but who clutched a shrieking Core. That charioteer was supposedly Hades, brother of Zeus. Demeter was so furious that she traveled all over the Earth, everywhere forbidding the plants to yield fruits, vegetables and herbs. Humanity thus came to the brink of extinction. After much negotiation the 12 Olympian gods agreed that Core should be returned to Demeter, who was presently waiting at Eleusis. However, it was soon proven that whilst in Tartarus Core picked a (red) pomegranate and ate 7 of its seeds. (In autumn the ripe fruit of the pomegranate tree splits open, like a wound, and thus reveals its red seeds. The pomegranate tree represents Tammuz/Adonis. Likewise a pomegranate tree sprouts from the spilled blood of Dionysus.)

According to eternal law, nobody who eats the food of the dead can return to the world of the living. But a compromise was reached according to which Core would spend 1/3 of the year — or ½ or ¼ of the year — with Hades; the rest of the year she would spend with Demeter. It was then that Demeter instituted the Eleusian Mysteries. Now, that pomegranate corresponds to Eve’s apple. The 7 seeds correspond not only to the 7 planets but also to the 7 constellations immediate to the center of the northern face of the universal clock. The difference between Core spending 1/3 of the year and ½ or ¼ of the year in Tartarus corresponds to the patriarchal reduction of the triple-Goddess to a merely dual Maiden–Mother (White–Black), i.e. to the suppression of the Nymph and thus the reduction of the hero in general (as Hercules was reduced), and likewise to the switch from a year having 9 “suns” and 3 major seasons to a year having 12 moons/months and 4 major seasons. Which is to say, the abduction of Core is symbolic of the Great Reversal. Recognizing this significance, and recalling that the category “planets” includes comets and meteors, and noting the worldwide famine the myth attributes to Demeter’s fury, I am led to suggest that the speeding 4-horse chariot (the horse being a symbol of both Demeter, goddess of the Earth, and of Poseidon, god of earthquakes) bearing Hades and Core/Persephone — god and goddess of destruction — represents the giant comet(s) and/or meteor(s) that impacted the Earth c. 3200 BCE. Regardless, that chariot and its driver proto-mythologically represent the (female) Sun. Core, in other words, is not the abducted but the abductor: Hel, Helen, Swel, and so on. Likewise Hades — alias Menelaos, Man, Moon, Lucifer, Lug, Kronos, Hercules, etc. — is in truth the sacrificed hero/king. Eve’s apple and Helen’s apple are the original passport to death, given by the Nymph to her lover/hero/king, whom she effectively sacrifices when he is, say, 33 years old. Conversely, Hercules (i.e. Hades, Aïdes, Aï–Deus), upon completing his 12 Labors against proto-mythology, returns to Thebes and promptly divorces his wife Megara — who is precisely 33 years old — in order to obtain a younger, more auspicious wife. Yet the essentially proto-mythological heroes Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth both died aged 33 years.
As the Delphic Oracle severely commented, “Hercules of Tiryns is a very different man from his Caopic namesake.” Regarding Canopus, we will learn more about him in relation to the Argo, which ark of sorts — like all mythological arks — is equivalent to Cepheus, the Pegasus Square, the sanctuary of El, the vault below Solomon’s Temple, the city, the inn, Hercules, the Ka’aba, and generally to both body and soul, tomb and hero.
According to proto-mythology, the whole Middle Eastern geography around Haran should map to the universal clock. We’ve seen that Haran corresponds to Polaris, that Phoenicia corresponds to the Pegasus Square, and that the king of Byblos corresponds to the constellation Cepheus. Likewise the Euphrates corresponds to the so-called Milky Way, with Cygnus afloat on it. The Tigris corresponds to Oceanus, the river which flows from proto-mythological North on the northern face of the universal clock to proto-mythological South thereon. Likewise Oceanus, the Tigris, and the precessional journey of Osiris–Orion each correspond to the constellation Eridanus, which celestial river meanders southward from the foot of Osiris–Orion to the southern face of the universal clock, terminating at the star Achernar, 9^th brightest of all stars and nearly coincident with the point on that southern clock face which corresponds to 3200 BCE, the beginning of the Great Reversal. Sumeria’s Ur, with its famous bulls-head harps, corresponds to Lyra. Sumeria’s Eridu corresponds to the far South, i.e. to the constellation Hercules, the Ka’aba, to Columba, and to Achernar, the end of Eridanus. Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer, at once representing the Absent Father (Ouranos) and the Fallen Father (Kronos, Father Dis, Neptune, Poseidon, etc.) stands in the Persian Gulf.
The river Euphrates — the “Milky Way” — is especially interesting in this mytho-astro-geological-archaeological respect. The name Euphrates is a Greek version of the native Ufratu. The upper Euphrates is still termed the “Frat” by locals. This epithet recalls the English word freight, which word stems from the Old High German Vracht or Vrecht. The river’s freight is the dead, sacrificed king. Sure enough, the epithet “Hera’s Glory,” i.e. Herakles or Hercules, stems from the name of the Greek river Heracleius. The youthful Hercules — prior to performing his 12 Labors, and when he was still called Palaemon or Alcaeus and had not yet gained his more famous and considerably ironic epithet from the oracle of Delphi — vanquished king Pyraechmus of the Euboeans and had the king’s body torn in half by horses and exposed unburied on the banks of the Heracleius. Hera, as she has come down to us, is goddess of simple, White/Black death-in-life; Hercules is the corresponding hero. Both are reduced versions of the proto-mythological triple-Goddess–God. They represent the Great Reversal’s severance of cyclical time, of quantum time, the reduction of the Black/Baroque fractal to a space–time linear continuum. They represent the devaluation of the real, of the existential, of the medium, of Red/Dionysian complexity, and the overvaluation of the simply ideal, of the singular, of the point where extremes meet. They deny the river its freeing nature, its essence as boundary, which essence signifies the principle of fractal multiplicity and the corollary notion that there is real albeit metaphorical rebirth. Proto-mythologically, the Euphrates corresponds to the river of death. Plato calls this river the Without Memory River, the Amēleta Potamon, as well as the Forgetfulness River, the Lēthē Potamon. Amlethus (i.e. Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus’s version of the Hamlet story, c. 1200 CE; books III and IV of Gesta Danorum, a history of Denmark) is, like Plato’s hero Er, remarkably lacking memory of what he should be, of what he must be. Nevertheless he is charged with a sense of his destiny, which destiny is precisely equivalent to the destiny of his father. The Amēleta Potamon, i.e. the proto-Heracleius, corresponds to the boundary, the nothingness (as Sartre referred to it), between so-called monads; i.e. it corresponds to the ultimate freedom of monads, to the multiplicity-in-unity of monads, to the beauty of reality, of existence, of the Black/Baroque, which is not to be denied by the Hera-style, Zoroastrian-style idealism concomitant of the Great Reversal.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans associated death with a goddess: Kolyo “the coverer.” She is equivalent to the Russian Kupalo, to the Greek Kalypso (cognate with eclipse), to the Jain Kali, to Anna, to Merlin’s love Viviane (a.k.a. Nimu, etc.), and, in a reduced sense, to Hera, to the Vedic Śarva, to the Avestan Saurva, to Abraham’s Sarai. The Sanskrit verbal root vr present in these latter names (as -rv or simply -r) does in fact mean “to cover.” The river Euphrates is equivalent to Kolyo; it is not a “milky way” but a muddy way, brown or, hyperbolically, black. The brown goddess is the complete goddess: Black, White and Red, i.e. Black/Baroque. Here is the secret blackness of milk, the secret blackness of the Milky Way.
According to Greek mythology the father of Palaemon (i.e. of Alcaeus, of Hercules) is Zeus, and the mother is the mortal Alcmene, “strong in wrath.” Alcmene is the last mortal with whom Zeus mates. He intends to produce by her a hero who will save both humanity and the gods. Therefore he takes the form of her husband Amphitryon (note the try- root) and lays with her for 3 full nights while tricking her (note the tri- root of the word trick, which word stems from the Latin tricae, “complication, trifle,” and is closely related to tribe) into thinking that but a single night has passed. Alcmene is equivalent to the triple-Goddess; and true to form she in turn gives birth to twins: Iphicles and Palaemon, elder and younger, respectively. (The fundamental role of Iphicles is suppressed in the legend, but his name resonates with Phyllis, “leafy,” and with the red Philistines, and with the Latin felis, “cat,” and filial, “son,” and filum, “thread,” and felare, “to suck,” and with Palaemon’s eventual friend Phylius, who is friends/lovers with Cycnus, a son of Apollo by Hyria, he who leaps into a lake and is transformed into a swan. Another Cycnus is son of Ares and Pyrene and challenges Paleamon/Hercules to a duel which Zeus in turn prevents.) Alcmene fears Hera’s jealousy and therefore abandons the infant Palaemon/Alcaeus in a Theban field — precisely as Gaia abandons Erichthonios, and precisely as the Levite woman abandons Moses along the Nile. (Supposedly Alcmene retains the far weaker Iphicles, claiming him to be a son of Amphitryon, who in fact mated with her the night after Zeus finished doing so.) Consequently Zeus has Athena take Hera for a walk through that field. Hera of course finds the babe and puts him to her breast, but he sucks so hard that she shrieks in pain and flings him to the ground — calling him a “young monster” as a spurt of her milk arcs across the sky. This is how the Milky Way was formed. Athena then returns the consequently immortal boy — who is precisely as immortal as the Milky Way (which is a constellation of sorts, and the most complex constellation, at that) — to Alcmene. This story recalls, among many others, those about Erichthonios and about Moses. Erichthonios was abandoned by Gaia and found by Athena, who gave him to Aglauros for nursing and later took him back and reared him under her own aegis, literally. Likewise the pharaoh’s daughter found Moses by the Nile and gave him back to his Hebrew mother (of the priestly, Red/Dionysian tribe Levi, as was the boy’s father) for nursing, who eventually gave him back to the princess, who then named him Moses, “Because I drew him out of the water.” Thus the name Moses corresponds to the name Hercules — i.e. to the river Heracleius, the river of death, the river of forgetfulness, of freedom, of fractally quantum multiplicity-in-unity and thus of rebirth, of beauty, of the Black/Baroque — and Athena corresponds to the pharaoh’s daughter and to Apollo’s (rather than Gaia’s) oracle at Delphi. The Thebans yet point to the place where Zeus and Athena tricked Hera; they call it the Plain of Hercules; and it corresponds to the northern face of the universal clock and especially to the most complex and the most central constellations thereof: respectively, the Milky Way and the sea–serpent Draco (a.k.a. Typhon, Python, etc.) and thus to Delphi as well. Erichthonios, Moses, Hercules, and, for that matter, the aforementioned Briareus (as in briar patch, i.e. heather, the Greek ereikē; and bier and bear): they are all equivalent to that sea serpent, to Zeus sleeping on his couch. Gaia is clearly proto-Hera is clearly Alcmene is clearly the Levite mother: the full triple-Goddess rather than the reduced, relatively White/Black goddess of the Great Reversal. Yet said reduction is never complete. The Hera of the Great Reversal still has a foot in the Golden Age, she is still the triple-Goddess, still the killer of her husband. She’s now a housewife, to be sure; but she’s a desperate housewife, a nymph as well as a virgin and crone.
Hera’s hatred of Hercules is overstated by the Greek mythographers. Insofar as Hera is proto-Hera (eg. Gaia) she (a) hates Hercules inasmuch as he is the new hero, poster boy of the Great Reversal, yet (b) loves him inasmuch as he is the proto-mythological hero; and insofar as she is the new Hera, the ultimate wife and mother of the Great Reversal, she (c) loves Hercules inasmuch as he is the hero of the Great Reversal, and (d) hates him inasmuch as he is the proto-mythological hero. Naturally the Greek mythographers appealed to the peoples’ (i.e. to the Black/Baroque’s) eternally proto-mythological heartstrings. In this chief respect these mythographers, being of course advocates of the Great Reversal, painted Hera the bad cop, the character trying to suppress the emergence of the appropriate hero; concomitantly they painted Zeus the good cop, the promoter of this hero. Therefore Hera tricks (i.e. trifles) Zeus into nominating the relatively weakly Eurytheus to the throne (throne being another tro/try/tre/tri word) which Zeus had otherwise destined Hercules for. Bad Hera! Yet Eurytheus is profoundly weak: his name means “red Zeus” and he is said to be a “7-months child,” this redness symbolizing his priestly, pre-sacrificed, aboriginal, Kronos-like, senescent nature, and the reference to premature birth likewise at once indicating Eurytheus’s relative weakness and his antiquity, for in the Golden Age the year was divided into 9 months of 40 days and therefore all healthy gestations lasted about 7 of these months (9 x 30 = 270, 7 x 40 = 280). Zeus responds by tricking Hera: he suggests that Hercules humble himself by performing 12 labors to be stipulated by her lame king, if you will, but that Hercules should also be immortal. Hera agrees to the deal. Although Eurytheus is equivalent (though not identical) to Kronos as Hercules is equivalent to Zeus, Zeus is moreover equivalent to Kronos, having replaced him as the chief god; and in this sense Eurystheus is equivalent to Zeus and is thus bound to act out Zeus’s overarching program, the program of the Great Reversal. It follows that all the 12 labors which Eurystheus forces upon Hercules are attacks upon proto-mythological symbols. Yet the story paints Hera the aggressor in this respect, for Eurytheus is her man, so to speak. Again the (Black/Baroque) chorus (of satyrs; i.e. the People) is meant to yell, “Bad Hera!” Nevertheless the immortality of Hercules expresses the immortality which Zeus intends for the Great Reversal (i.e. for himself); and the proto-mythological river of forgetfulness, of sacrifice, of death-and-fractally-quantum-rebirth, of multeity-in-unity, of beauty, of the triune Black/Baroque (White–Red–Black), the canopy of the World Tree, is painted a literal galaxy of merely White (i.e. White/Black) milk, a symbol of the Mother’s woundedness, of her fall, and of the supposed Heaven/Hell beyond and more final than the material world. Thus the yo-yo between White and Red, simplicity and complexity, goes on; and although a fundamental aspect of Hera is indeed in complicity with the merely White, the account of the conversation (as it were) — which account tends to be constructed by the supposed victors, i.e. by the advocates of the merely White, of the Great Reversal — naturally paints Hera as being petty if not too trivial (as in the Latin “Diana of the Crossroads,” a.k.a. Trivia) relative to a more even-handed, reasonable, straightforward Zeus. (All you trivia buffs out there are at least inasmuch Red/Dionysian advocates to the Golden/Legal philosophy.)
In this light consider the following from Robert Graves’ Greek Myths:
Olympianism had been formed as a religion of compromise between the pre-Hellenic matriarchal principle and the Hellenic patriarchal principle; the divine family consisting, at first, of six gods and six goddesses. An uneasy balance of power was kept until Athene was reborn from Zeus’s head, and Dionysus, reborn from his thigh, took Hestia’s seat at the divine Council; thereafter male preponderance in any divine debate was assured — a situation reflected on earth — and the goddess’s ancient prerogatives could now be successfully challenged.
Hestia abdicates to live among the mortals (i.e. the People, the Black/Baroque). Dionysus, her replacement, is naturally a Red male, i.e. a female male. Likewise Demeter absents Olympus during part of each year, to visit her daughter Core (a.k.a. Persephone) in the under-underworld (Tartarus) ruled by Hades (who has abducted Core but by compromise with Zeus and Demeter keeps her for this part of the year only); and in this sense Hades is admitted to Olympos. Which is to say, insofar as Hestia and Demeter remain (rather proto-mythologically) on Olympus, Dionysus and Hades are not admitted — Dionysus being proto-mythologically of the real, material realm, the Earthly realm, the medium, and Hades being proto-mythologically of the merely ideal, Black realm which in its extremity meets (White) Olympus. Moreover with the Great Reversal we get the aforementioned denigration/masculinization of Hera, the virginalization of Artemis, the maligning of Ares, etc. The original 12 Olympians are Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, Hephaistos, Hermes, Apollo, Hera, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hestia, Athena, and Artemis, listed here in no special order although Zeus above all represents the grand compromise Graves refers to in the passage above.

A traditional painting of Kali, recently created by a woman villager
near Madhubni in the Mithila province of far northeastern India.

Incredibly beautiful to behold from the front, the primeval, triple-Goddes Kolyo — proto-Hera, Kali, etc. — is incredibly hideous from the back, her posterior writhing with snakes and worms. Every creature is ultimately bound to Kolyo by a snare about a foot or a noose about the neck — or simply by their very guts. Thereby she pulls every hero to his death, swallows them, renders them the Green Man, the Green Knight, the Wild Man, “the gardener” and “the rock” (i.e. the base). Thus every Arthurian knight except Galahad is swallowed by the Earth when he attempts to sit in the Round Table’s 12^th chair. (The association between Kolyo’s writhing posterior and the Green Man’s verdurous face lends further credence to the notion that the aforementioned monster Humbaba/Huwawa in the Epic of Gilgamesh is essentially identical to the Green Man, i.e. to Humphrey, Humpty, Jupiter, Zeus, Odin, etc. As such, the Green Man motif is considerably euphemistic.) Sacrifice by drowning or live burial, or by strangulation or hanging or, for that matter, by drawing and quartering, is a direct reference to Kolyo, i.e. to the very nature of existence. A prime domain of Kolyo is the underwater, the underground, the intensive, the intrinsic, the tomb, the night, symbolized especially by muddy water, by mud, by the mound of earth, by the pond, the enclosure, the cube, the tomb. She never sleeps, for she involves sleep. She never dies, for she involves death. Which is to say, Kolyo covers in terms of the stars and planets (especially the Sun) as well as the Earth. This is the sense in which the ancient Egyptians considered Nut goddess of the heavens.

Generally speaking, the proto-mythological river is the whole universal clock. This complex river’s otherwise singular freight is Cygnus (or Sigmund), Zeus, Finn, Draco, Erichthonios, Moses, Hercules, Briareus, the Phoenix — i.e. a feathered serpent (flyer–crawler, riser–faller, White–Red). In Cygnus-upon-the-Euphrates we have an image of the Indian river “burial” and of the Viking sea burial: the dead leader placed on a barque, set aflame, and set afloat. Such ritual is still re-enacted in Europe in terms of the Green Man or Wild Man, whose fatal commitment to the river, pond, lake or ocean marks the end/beginning of a prime if not chief annual cycle. Cygnus is equivalent to the original sacrifice, the penis of Ouranos, from which Aphrodite emerges — she whose name means “foam-born,” a reference to the foam of the sea.
Like the Tigris, the river Jordan corresponds to the celestial river Oceanus. The Jordan flows straight south from the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea, i.e. into the constellation Hercules, and inasmuch into the land (or house) of the dead (the Welsh Annwn), the Pegasus Square, Phoenicia, from which rises the World Tree. According to this understanding the constellation Cepheus corresponds to Har Megiddo, i.e. Armageddon.
Likewise the Jordan corresponds to Ireland’s river Boyne (An Bhóinn), the Sea of Galilee being equivalent to the source of the Boyne, i.e. to the Well of Knowledge (lake, pond, pounde, enclosure) wherein lives the salmon Finntan. The Boyne and with it the Oceanus, the Tigris, and the Jordan are trees of sorts but they are not identical to the World Tree. Whereas the World Tree (i.e. the Tree of Life and Death) springs from the Pegasus Square (corresponding to Phoenicia) and rises to the constellation Cepheus where it aborts into the canopy which is the entire Milky Way galaxy, the Tree of Knowledge (“of Good and Evil,” i.e. of White and Red) springs from the square trunk of Hercules (corresponding to the Ka’aba) and rises to Polaris where it aborts into the invisible canopy which is the northern face of the universal clock. Wrapped around the Tree of Knowledge is Draco, Tityos. Both of these trees rise toward Haran. But the World Tree is far the more obvious of the pair and as such it was discovered very early in pre-history. The Tree of Knowledge is precisely as subtle as the universal i.e. as physics itself — and as such it was discovered very late in pre-history.
The Dublin area’s more southerly river, the remarkably dark brown Liffey, which unlike the clear Boyne flows directly through Dublin, corresponds to the Euphrates and to the Milky Way portions of the universal clock. Of the Liffey Joyce writes, “The stream is quite brown, rich in salmon, very devious, shallow. The splitting up towards the end (seven dams) is the city abuilding.” Dublin corresponds to Jerusalem and to Uruk and to Cairo (with its Giza plateau) — and each corresponds to the constellation Cygnus. Likewise London is the Euston Hotel is the Euphrates is Dublin. Which is to say, the city is equivalent to its hometown hero, the once and future king, the sacrificed Father Dis. Dublin is the Devil’s Inn is Phoenix Park is HCE is every city, every town, every home, every mind.
Cepheus/Cygnus appears in Central America as Quetzalcoatl: “Feathered Serpent” or “Admirable Twin,” fair of face and white of beard, teacher of the arts, originator of the calendar, and giver of maize. Indeed, the prefix Quetzal-, “feathered,” seems cognate with the name Cepheus (Aramaic Qepha) and with the word castle. Another cognate is castrate, as in the story of Kronos castrating his father Ouranos. Frazer:
At the festival of the winter solstice in December the Aztecs killed their god Huitzilopochtli in effigy first and ate him afterwards. As a preparation for this solemn ceremony an image of the deity in the likeness of a man was fashioned out of seeds of various sorts, which were kneaded into a dough with the blood of children. The bones of the god were represented by pieces of acacia wood. This image was placed on the chief altar of the temple, and on the day of the festival the king offered incense to it. Early next day it was taken down and set on its feet in a great hall. Then a priest, who bore the name and acted the part of the god Quetzalcoatl, took a flint-tipped dart and hurled it into the breast of the dough-image, piercing it through and through. This was called “killing the god Huitzilopochtli so that his body might be eaten.” One of the priests cut out the heart of the image and gave it to the king to eat. The rest of the image was divided into minute pieces, of which every man great and small, down to the male children in the cradle, receive one to eat. But no woman might taste a morsel. The ceremony was called teoqualo, that is, “god is eaten.”
As Frazer later notes: “For the strongest of all oaths is that which is accompanied with the eating of a sacred substance, since the perjured person cannot possibly escape the avenging god whom he has taken into his body and assimilated.” The implication here is almost incredibly strong and in fact it will resonate throughout the rest of this volume: According to proto-mythology the king is sacrificed and his body is then eaten by his tribe — this cannibalism being the ultimate consecration of the moment of multeity-in-unity.
In the Huitzilopochtli–Quetzalcoatl, White–Red, Hercules–Cepheus duality we have good old Osiris–Orion, good old Finn, again. In Greek myth Zeus is Quetzalcoatl in the form of a swan. As a swan Zeus mates with the human Leda, wife of Tyndareus, beside the river Eurotas (seemingly cognate with Euphrates). She in turn gives birth to 2 swan eggs: an egg containing the twins Castor (“beaver” — i.e. sawyer, serpent-tailed, mound-builder — a “‘tamer of horses,” i.e. a partner of horses as well as of cows/aurochs, sows/boars, dogs/wolves, and lions, all of these being symbols of the triple-Goddess) and Clytemnestra (she who becomes the cuckolding/murderous/proto-mythological wife of Agamemnon), these twins being offspring of Tyndareus or of Zeus; and another egg containing Polydeuces (“many Deuses,” “much sweet wine,” “best in the boxing ring”; a.k.a. Pollux) and Helen (who becomes the cuckolding/proto-mythological wife of Menelaos), this pair being sired by Zeus or Tyndareus. Some say Helen alone as sired by Zeus. Castor and Polydeuces are inseparable; they become known as the Dioscuri and are eventually deified and their image set among the stars as the constellation Gemini. In another version of the myth, Zeus in the form of a beaver pursues the goddess Nemesis in the form of a fish. During the chase the pair transform into various beasts. As a goose Nemesis takes flight, but as a swan Zeus finally overtakes her and mates with her. Nemesis proceeds to Sparta, where Queen Leda presently discovers a hyacinth-colored (i.e. purplish) egg lying in a marsh. Leda brings the egg home and hides it in a chest. “But some say the egg dropped from the moon,” writes Robert Graves,” like the egg that, in ancient times, plunged into the river Euphrates and, being towed ashore by fishes and hatched by doves, broke open to reveal the Syrian Goddess of Love.” The goddess hatched of said purple egg is Helen. This egg, comments Graves, recalls the blood-red egg, the glain, that the Druids hunted for by the seashore every spring and which in Celtic myth was laid by the goddess as sea–serpent.
The 1^st of each of these twins is a dominantly Red/Dionysian character, and the 2nd is predominantly White/Apollonian. Likewise, “red-haired, great-lunged, clarion-in-battle” Menelaos, “dear to Ares,” and whose shield (according to Polygnotus’s famous painting at Delphi) is adorned with a serpent badge/apotropaion, is Red/Dionysian while his power-hungry twin brother Agamemnon, so offensive to the gods and to Achilles, is White/Apollonian. Note in this respect that the god Apollo is best understood as representing the White aspect within proto-mythology. Agamemnon and the Greeks altogether are offensive to Apollo in the sense that Apollo chiefly identifies himself relative to proto-mythology. Thus Apollo — and likewise Zeus, Ares, Artemis, Leto, Xanthos/Skamander (the mighty, eddying river) and Aphrodite — side with the Trojans (note the tro- prefix, a variety of the White/Apollonian tri-, tre-, and dru-) while Poseidon (insofar as he is considered Zeus’s younger brother), Athena, Hera, Hermes and Hephaistos (all being watered-down versions of earlier goddesses and gods) side with the Greeks. Pointedly refusing to subject himself to proto-mythology, Agamemnon inasmuch frees himself to take his White/Apollonianism to the extreme, i.e. to maximize his power, to unify Greece, to impose an ostensible Redness which is nevertheless best understood as a Whiteness, a mere unity rather than a truly Red/Dionysian multeity-in-unity. In contrast, the Trojan prince Paris/Alexandros acts relative to Menelaos and Helen as Aigisthos acts relative to Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, as Ares acts relative to Hephaistos (the “bow-legged, crippled” god of fire) and Aphrodite, as Tristan acts relative to Mark and Iseult, as Lancelot acts relative to Arthur and Guinevere. Apollo, “lord of the distant,” is Paris, Aigisthos, Tristan, and Lancelot. Helen and likewise the yet more proto-mythological Clytemnestra essentially sacrifice their husband-kings. As such, these female characters stand in contrast to the extremely faithful Penelope, wife of Athena’s favorite, Odysseus, i.e. of he who is the best hero possible in relation to the Great Reversal. Of Clytemnestra Agamemnon’s ghost says to Odysseus: “But that woman, plotting a thing so low, defiled herself and all her sex, all women yet to come, even those who may be virtuous.” The emergence of Odysseus from the Trojan War marks the emergence of the new, markedly less proto-mythological heroic type; i.e. it marks the emergence of the Great Reversal, the virtual demise of proto-mythological sacrifice. In the final pages of the Odyessey Zeus proclaims: “There is one proper way, if I may say so: Odysseus’ honor being satisfied, let him be king by a sworn pact forever ....” The god most resonant, most confused, in this emergence is Poseidon, god of earthquakes as well as god of the sea: Poseidon favors the Greeks over the Trojans; yet he saves the Trojan Aeneas so that the great line of Dardanos–Erichthonios–Tros (Dardanos being a son of Zeus) may continue (as the Roman line of kings; Julius Caesar considered himself a descendant of Aeneas); he develops a severe grudge against Odysseus, who near the end of his life must trek to a distant land “where men have lived with meat unsalted, never known the sea, nor seen seagoing ships” and there plant his oar (as if it were a tree) and make sacrifices to Poseidon, this before returning home to make appropriate sacrifices to all the gods. The blind ghost Teiresias is he who prophecies this destiny to Odysseus. Teiresias says that the precise place and time at which to plant the oar will be marked where and when a passerby asks the hero, “What winnowing fan is that on your shoulder?” Winnowing fans are used to separate grain from chaff. When Maia gave birth to Hermes in the cave on Mount Cyllene, she wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him on a winnowing fan. Likewise the hierophants performing the Eleusinian mysteries entered the murky place dressed as shepherds and emerged carrying a winnowing fan on which rested the infant Brimos, whom the celebrants preferred to call Iacchus, after the raucous hymn by the same name, which was sung during a torchlight procession from Demeter’s temple on the 6th day of the Mysteries. These Mysteries occurred from the 15^th through the 21^st days of the month Boedromion (“running for help”), the initial month of the lunar-solar Attic calendar, the New Year's Day of which approximated the autumnal equinox. Jane Harrison notes that in early Greek vase paintings Dionysus carries a winnowing fan rather than a grape-basket. Indeed, the Latin word for winnowing fan is vannus, similar to the Latin name for Dionysus, Faunus. The words winnow and wine are closely linked, probably because beer antedated wine. Dionysus was god of grain and god of beer (i.e. he was equivalent to Brimos and to the Phrygian Sabazius) before he was god of wine. What’s more, recognizing the cognate relationship of winnow and wine with wind, and recalling that wind is the original masculine mythological character/seed, we see that Dionysus is most fundamentally the god of masculine fertility. He is equivalent to Aeolus, Hermes, Polaris, Boreas.
Leda is a manifestation of the Titan Leto, daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus and mother by Zeus of Artemis and Apollo. The names Leda and Leto are cognate with Kolyo “the coverer,” for they mean “to gather earth or water” or “earth or water gathered.” Note especially the obvious relations: Kolyo, Leo (symbol of the Sun), Kalypso, lips (and lisp), eclipse, Leto, Leda, Hippolyta, Leah, Elaine. The Kol- prefix means “earth” or “water” and is akin to the English coal, which derives from the Old Norse kol, “burning ember.” Interesting cognates include the Latin word for beetle, coleoptera (“shiny black coverer lion that flies”), and the English colon. Kol- is further cognate with co- and with the German ge-, both meaning “with.” In Latin and French cul means “anus” — the word anus deriving from the Latin anus, “ring,” and annus, “year” (as in annual), and akin to the Old Irish ánne, “ring,” the Greek ana, “up, back, again,” and the Russian name Anastasia, meaning “resurrection.” Here is Anna Livia Plurabelle. In terms of the planets, She is the Sun. The lion and the scarab (i.e. beetle, coleoptera) are prime symbols for Her. The name Phoebe is Greek for “clear, bright, pure”; it is cognate with Finn and therefore with Zeus, Cepheus, Quetzalcoatl, Cygnus, and the P-I-E Dyeus (again, from the *deywo-s, “celestial, luminous, radiant”) and hence with Dione, Demeter, Diana, i.e. complete Woman. As we might expect, the name Coeus (or Co-ius), said to mean “intelligence,” is cognate with Kolyo. The suffix -eus (or -ius) means “to gather” and “the thing gathered”; the suffix -yo seems to be equivalent.
The very name of the Latin people and language derives from the covering, secretive, nature of Kolyo: Latin, from latere, “to hide.” Virgil says the name Latium owes to the fact that Saturn/Kronos concealed himself from Jupiter/Zeus in this countryside, á la the Green Man. Virgil, from his Aenied:
These woodland places
Once were homes of local fauns and nymphs
Together with a race of men that came from tree trunks, from hard oak: they had no way
Of settled life, no arts of life, no skill
At yoking oxen, gathering provisions,
Practicing husbandry, but got their food
From oaken boughs and wild game hunted down.
In that first time, out of Olympian heaven,
Saturn came here in flight from Jove in arms,
An exile from a kingdom lost; he brought
These unschooled men together from the hills
Where they were scattered, gave them laws, and chose
The name Latium, from his latency
Or safe concealment in the countryside.
In his reign were the golden centuries
Men tell of still, so peacefully he ruled,
Till gradually a meaner, tarnished age
Came on with fever of war and lust of gain.
The Latin word latices, “waters,” is another cognate, as are the English latitude and ladder. Vico reports that latere was invariably modified by the epithet puri, “pure,” specifically referring to springs of water, i.e. to Tigrises/Boynes in contrast to Euphrateses/Liffeys. Likewise we have the English word latent.
Kalypso, note, is the antithesis of apocalypse. The prefix apo- (as in the name Apollo) means “un” or “dis” or “off.” An apocalypse is not a covering but an uncovering. In this connection recall the kerf cut made by the sawyer. That cut is akin to the mouth — and especially the lips — of the Pharaoh. Indeed, the word kerf (as in kerchief) stems from the Old French covrir, “to cover.” The Opening of the Mouth ceremony performed upon the deceased Pharaoh references both his sacrifice and his resurrection, his covering and his uncovering, his collapse and his rise.
In light of Leda and Leto, let’s take a further look at the le- prefix. Recall its presence in the words legal, legacy, legend, left and ligature, and in the names Levi, Leah, Galeed, and hence Elaine and Galahad. The English word lea or ley means “grassland.” It is related to the German lied, “song,” the Old English leah, “thicket,” and the Latin words lucus, “grove,” lux, “light,” ludr, “mill,” and hence to the name Luther. These relations indicate the richness of my term Golden/Legal.
The near universality of the Golden/Legal mythology in even its most precise form is especially evident in the aforementioned myth of Quetzalcoatl. In this respect consider the following from Campbell ’s Primitive Mythology:
[Quetzalcoatl’s] virgin mother, Chimalman — the legend tells — had been one of three sisters whom God, the All-Father, had appeared to one day under his form of Citlallatonac, “the morning.” The other two had been struck by fright, but upon Chimalman God breathed and she conceived. She died, however, giving birth, and is now in heaven, where she is revered under the honorable name of “the Precious Stone of Sacrifice,” Chalchihuitzli [note the Chal- prefix, cognate with Kol-?].
Quetzalcoatl, her child, who is known both as the Son of the Lord of the High Heavens and as the Son of the Lord of the Seven Caves, was endowed at birth with speech, all knowledge, and all wisdom, and in later life, as priest-king, was of such purity of character that his realm flourished gloriously throughout the period of his reign. His temple palace was composed of four radiant apartments: one toward the east, yellow with gold; one toward the west, blue with turquoise and jade; one toward the south, white with pearls and shells; one toward the north, red with bloodstones … And it was set wonderfully above a mighty river that passed through the midst of the city of Tula; so that every night, precisely at midnight, the king descended into the river to bathe; and the place of his bath was called “In the Painted Vase,” or “In the Precious Waters.” But the time of his predestined defeat by the dark brother, Tezcatlipoca, was ever approaching; and, knowing perfectly the rhythm of his own destiny, Quetzalcoatl would make no move to stave it.
The dark brother Tezcatlipoca (note the Te- prefix, equivalent to Ti-, Se-, Si-, Ve-, Vi-, We-, Wi-, De-, Di-) holds a mirror to Quetzalcoatl, who is horrified by his now elderly and loathesome visage. Tezcatlipoca causes Quetzalcoatl and their sister, Quetzalpetlat — who resides on Mount Nonoalco — to become drunk. The inebriated pair of siblings engage in sexual intercourse with each other that night.
… And in the morning Quetzalcoatl said in shame, “I have sinned; the stain of my name cannot be erased. I am not fit to rule this people. Let them build a habitation for me deep under ground; let them bury my bright treasures in the earth; let them throw the glowing gold and shining stones in the Precious Waters where I take my nightly bath.”
And all was done. The king remained four days in his underground tomb, and when he came forth he wept and told his people that the time had come for his departure to the Red Land, the Dark Land, the Land of Fire.
… Quetzalcoatl, in great sorrow departed. Resting at a certain place along the way and looking back in the direction of Tula, his City of the Sun, he wept, and his tears went through a rock; he left in that place the mark of his sitting and the impress of his palms. Farther along, he was met and challenged by a company of necromancers, who prevented him from proceeding until he had left with them the arts of working silver, wood, and feathers, and the art of painting. As he crossed the mountains, many of his attendants, who were dwarfs and humpbacks, died of cold. At another place he met his dark antagonist, Tezcatlipoca, who defeated him at a game of ball. At still another he aimed with an arrow at a large pochotl tree; and the arrow too was a pochotl tree, so that when he shot it through the first they formed a cross. And so he passed along, leaving many signs and place-names behind him, until, coming at last to where the sky, land and water come together, he departed.
Tula is tomb is Cygnus is Quetzalcoatl is Jerusalem is Dublin is London is Uruk is Cairo is Sun is son. Said entry into the tomb is the spear/knife/head/tomb/ark/home/castle of Cepheus. The 4 days in the tomb are the 4 Zodiacal ages between that tomb and the constellation Hercules, these being Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, and Virgo. Recall Joyce: “Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!” These 4 Zodiacal ages correspond to the 4/12 = 1/3 of the 24-hour day — i.e. the 8 hours — that a human typically spends sleeping at night. This 8-ness corresponds to the 8 years that the Phoenician god El lives with his twin wives and twin sons in the sanctuary in the desert. It also corresponds to the famous 8-ness of the planet Venus, to be described later on.
Quetzalcoatl’s resting place following his resurrection corresponds to the constellation Bootes. The necromancers correspond to the constellation Ursa Major, which constellation, as I will later explain, is associated with the Greek Prometheus, son of the Titans Themis and Iapetus. Mount Nonoalco and the defeat by the dark, priestly brother corresponds to Polaris. The large pochotl is the World Tree, rising from the place of the tomb. The World Tree marks the beginning of the Zodiacal age of Sagittarius, which name stems from the Latin sagitta, meaning “archer.” The cross formed by the arrow through a tree is the constellation Cygnus.
Reaching the sea at last, where the sky, land and water meet, Quetzalcoatl departs on a raft of serpents. He is expected to return to Tula from the east, with a fair-faced retinue. Campbell:
The priests and astrologers did not know in what cycle he was to appear; however, the name of the year within the cycle had been predicted, of old, by Quetzalcoatl himself. Its sign was “One Reed” (Ce Acatl) [note that Ce is akin to Se], which, in the Mexican calendar, is a year that occurs only once in every cycle of fifty-two. But the year when Cortez arrived, with his company of fair-faced companions and his standard, the cross, was precisely the year “One Reed.”
In referring to the year One Reed this myth seems to be referring as well to the day One Reed, i.e. to New Year’s Day, for there are 52 weeks of 7 days each in a year; and as such the myth is also referring to the age One Reed. Recall in this connection that the Sumerian root gi — prefix of the name Gilgamesh and of the Hebrew’s high sanctuary Gilgal — means not only “young man” but also “small and thin like a reed” and “to reject, dislike; to return, come back, send; to answer, restore.” Later we will interpret the Epic of Gilgamesh in terms of the universal clock. In this same respect we will address other classic legends, including the Argonautica, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.
The Quetzalcoatl Legend

In further regard to the universality of the feathered serpent — i.e. the god of the underworld, Father Dis, Deus, the Devil, Zeus, Finn, etc. — consider the following from Frazer:
Some of the native tribes of Central Queensland believe in a noxious being called the Molonga, who prowls unseen and would kill men and violate women if certain ceremonies were not performed. These ceremonies last for five nights and consist of dances, in which only the men, fantastically painted and adorned, take part. On the fifth night Molonga himself, personified by a man tricked out with red ochre and feathers and carrying a long feather-tipped spear, rushes forth from the darkness at the spectators and makes as if he would run them through.
In the valley of the Mississippi River south of my hometown — and not far from Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri — lives a Molonga-like creature. The 7 men of the famous Mississippi River expedition led by Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and fur trader Louis Joliet — which expedition had begun at the Mission of St. Ignace, in what is now far northern Michigan — encountered this creature in 1673 CE as they paddled their 2 canoes down the Mississippi just north of present-day Alton, Illinois. Painted in red, yellow, green and black on a limestone bluff rising from the eastern side of the river were several images which the explorers described as follows:
They are as large as a calf, with head and horns like a deer or goat; their eyes red; beard like a tiger; and a face somewhat like a man. Their bodies are covered with scales. Their tails are so long that they pass over their heads and between their forelegs, under their belly, and end like a fish tail.
The natives called this creature Piasa, “the bird that eats men.” The Piasa was said to live in a cave in the bluff. Whenever a person approached the bluff, the monster swooped down and carried the victim to the cave. Eventually a chief named Quatonga prayed to the Great Manitou for help. The Great Manitou (note the Mani prefix) told Quatonga that only he, Quatonga, could defeat the Piasa. Quatonga therefore concealed 20 of his warriors near the entrance of said cave and approached it to draw the serpent-bird into the trap. The Piasa swooped down, and Quatonga’s warriors killed it with poison arrows. The paintings on the bluff were made to commemorate this victory.
It’s St. George — as well as Uther Pendragon, Arthur, Lancelot, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mark, Tristan, Finn, Diarmuid, etc. — all over again. The little red dragon in Altdorfer’s painting represents not only the priestly class but also (and likewise) the king who has overstayed his natural welcome, who, like both Quetzalcoatl and Gorlois, has become aged and ugly, and who in the process of prolonging his senescence has required many others be sacrificed in his stead. Such king must be removed by a new, pure, vital incarnation of the hero.
Mention of Marquette and Joliet, the Mississippi River, and the Piasa bird brings me to the following exercise which you might try yourself. See if you can match the Pegasus Square, the World Tree, Polaris, the Milky Way (Euphrates), Cygnus (Dublin, London, Jerusalem, Uruk), Hercules, and Oceanus (Tree of Knowledge, Draco, the Tigris, the Boyne) to your local geography. If you’ve read my little biography, you know that I grew up a Protestant in the very Roman Catholic and relatively old town of Dubuque, Iowa, USA, beside the Mississippi River. You know, too, that Antonin Dvorák composed his From the New World (Symphony No. 9) in Spillville, a Czech enclave about 60 miles to the northwest; that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin (“Shining Brow” in Welsh) lies about the same distance away to the northeast (just outside Spring Green, Wisconsin); that Galena (home of Ulysses S. Grant) is slightly east of Dubuque, on a Mississippi tributary; and that the whole area was famous for its “Copperheads” (named after the poisonous snake) during the United States’ Civil War. I might add that I was born in Dubuque’s (Protestant) Finley Hospital.

Next chapter: “Brown Trojan Atlantis”