“... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,”
and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the _Paradiso_
(relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and
February 14).
“_The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun._”
May and November are the two ‘fatal’ months with the Celtic peoples:
the first because of the influence of the Queen of Faerie (she has
many names), and the second because of Midir, who sleeps in November,
or, as another legend has it, ‘goes away’ in that month. In that month
too the Daughter of Midir has departed on her long quest of her brother
Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a confused traditionary remembrance, or
a mytho-poeic invention.... I have come upon it once only), to find him
asleep under the shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to woo him
with pale arctic fires, and auroras, and a faint music wrought out of
the murmur of polar airs on a harp made of a seal’s breast-bone. It is
but in another guise the old Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom
of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that the touch of Dalua, the
Secret Fool or the Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death. Once
more, it is in November that Lîr holds his great banquet, a banquet
that lasts three months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under the waves.
In one way or another all these dreams are associated with the sea,
with water and the Winter Solstice. By different ways of thought, of
tradition, and of dreaming phantasy, the minds of this race or that
people, of these scattered tribes or those broken clans, have reached
the same strange goals of the imagination. The spell of Capricorn
may be of the Waters of all time, since the Horned Goat of our Celtic
forbears, the ‘Buccan Horn’ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the Latin
‘Imbrifer’ or ‘Gelidus’ or ‘Sea-Goat’ (in several variants), the Greek
‘Athalpees’ or the commoner term signifying a Horned Goat, the ancient
Egyptian Chnemu, God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient Aztec
Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian
Munaxa, both signifying Goat Fish--and so forth, East and West, in the
dim past and the confused present,--are all directly or indirectly
associated with the element of Water, with the Sea, or rains, storm and
change and subtle regeneration. The Greek writers called the allied
constellation of Aquarius Hydrochoüs, the Water-Pourer, in mythological
connection (a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion and the great
Flood, that many believe to have been an ancestral memory of the Deluge
which submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave it the same name, ‘se
waeter-gyt.’ There is a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that dim
Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse or drowned Atlantis, to the
effect (for I know it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night
when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city unloosened to the devouring
waves by Dahut the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water shook a fiery
rain upon land and sea and that the floods of heaven fell, from the
wake of the Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of the unseen
tree that bears the silver Apples (the Pleiades), and as far as the
hidden Wellsprings (_the Constellation of Capricorn_) and The Mansion
of the White King (the Constellation of Aquarius)--the White King being
water personified.
Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian analogues for the last named,
Aquarius, relate to water. One of the few old-world exceptions was that
Roman Zodiac on which the constellation figured as a peacock, symbol
of Hêrê (Juno), because that in her month Gamelion (part January, part
February) the sun enters this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called
it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain Bringer. Another name was
Cecrops, because the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by the dews
and has its eggs hatched by the vernal rains. It would be wearisome to
collate superfluous instances. Enough, now, that the Arab, the Persian,
the Syrian and the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene and the
Anglo-Saxon in the designation of the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent
such as the Arabian _Al Dalw_, the Well-Bucket: that in China of old
its sign was recognised as a symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the
Chinese Deucalion: and that still among the astrologers of Central Asia
and Japan it has for emblem the Rat, the far-Asiatic ideograph for
water. Strange too that Star-Seers so remote as the Magi of the East
and the Druids of the West should centrate their stellar science on
this particular constellation. And, once more, not less strange that
alike by the banks of the Euphrates where it was called the Star of
Mighty Destiny, on the Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune
of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of the Gaul and the Gael where
too it symbolised Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star of
Fortune--the group alluded to by Dante in the _Purgatorio_:
“... geomancers their Fortuna Major
See in the Orient before the dawn ...”
Again, is it tradition or coincidence that the Platonists of old held
‘the stairs of Capricorn’ to be the stellar way by which the souls
of men ascended to heaven, so that the constellation became known as
the Gate of the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and mystics of
the West share the same belief? Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic
forbears--the Silver Road, as generally given though obviously very
loosely ... and may not the name more likely, especially in connection
with a basic legend of the constellation of Corona Borealis, be the
‘Mansion of Ariand’ (Ariadne)? ... though commonly applied to the Milky
Way or less often to the Northern Crown, is sometimes in its modern
equivalent used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to astrologers, this
Constellation with that of Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a
certain time ‘the House of Saturn’ is here to be discerned.
It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by
this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the
constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in
a rare book of some 200 years ago, _Meteorologiae_, speaks of Aquarius
by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted
designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion
did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English
word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that
universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius.
But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the
_Seasons_ (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted
year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of
spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following
its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it--so that ‘benign’ and
not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet.
All these ‘watery constellations’--Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the
Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces--are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in
the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of
Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they
flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky--the
clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset
of winter--the Lords of Rain--‘sad companions of the turning year’ as
an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides,
‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October
and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the
‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more
familiar to us in Tennyson’s
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.”
Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in
that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously
‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly
forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six
storm-stars are torches set apart.
Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the
Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and
‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from
flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of
splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the
subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s
language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly
look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look
before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the
Children of Water.
To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling
coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in
a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words
I read to-day in a translation of the _Bhagavad Gita_:--‘I am in the
hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all
from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the
Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One
is the Imperishable.’
The unconcerned One!