“Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”
Years ago I remember coming upon this mysterious phrase in a poem or
poetic drama by a French writer. The pagans, led by a priest, then
went into the woods; and, in a hollow made of a hidden place swept by
great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I forget whether the scourge of
drought ended then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches, if rains
poured through the leaves and mosses and reached the well-springs. I
recall only the invocation, and some faint and broken memory of the
twilight-procession of bitter hearts and wild voices, weary of vain
lamentation and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or silent gods. But
often I wondered as to Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous name.
Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his name signals, a strayed Latin?
And was he, as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a divinity of
the clouds, clothed, like the shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as
the more secretly to drive before him down the hidden ways of heaven
the myriad hosts of the rain? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings
of unfalling water, as a visionary once portrayed for me a likeness of
Midir, that ancient Gaelic god at whose coming came and still come the
sudden dews, or whose presence or the signs of whose passage would be
revealed and still are revealed by the white glisten on thickets and
grasses, by the moist coolness on the lips of leaf and flower.
The name, too, or one very like it, I heard once in a complicated
(and, alas, for the most part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of
Manan, the Poseidon of the Gael: remembered because of the singular
companionship of three or four other Latin-sounding names, which the
old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented or himself introduced, or
mayhap had in the sequence of tradition from some forgotten monkish
reciter of old. Aquarius and either Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly
given as the Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomical company,
I remember--and Neptheen or Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his
oneness with Manan’s self.
But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as though washed away by one of
his waves of rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, till the
other day. Then, as it happened, I came upon the name once more, in
a Latin quotation in an old book. So, he was of the proud Roman clan
after all! and, by the context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal
rains, and of those also that at the vernal equinox are as a sound of
innumerable little clapping hands.
Could he be an astronomical figure, a Zodiacal prince of dominion, I
wondered. In vain I searched through all available pages connected with
the Hyades, the Stars of Water: in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius,
of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and Pisces and Argo, that proud
Ship of March. But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing the
first sleet of winter whistle through the dishevelled oaks and soughing
firs, when I was idly reading and recalling broken clues in connection
with the astrological ‘House of Seturn,’ suddenly, in pursuit of a
cross-reference to some detail in connection with the constellation
of Capricorn, I encountered Imbrifer once more. ‘Imbrifer, the
Rain-Bringing One.’
So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of
remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of
the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic
Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only
on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running
waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the
mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word,
is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of
this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English
astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be
ryche and wel lufyd’!
Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many
of these October and November days of floods and rains! _Imbrifer_
... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of
our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July,
Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or
imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud
splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November,
if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’
or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and
grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!
Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.
“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun....”
as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind
Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have
recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:
“... Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The _Goat_ and _Sun_: and then a heaven-sent cold.”