St George of the Sprouting Crown

St George of the Sprouting Crown. Ethiopia, 19th c

What does this mean? Let me try to explain...

I'll start with the excerpt from my post "Letnitsa treasure":

Snakes are solar animals. They are in our world when sun is in our world (hot part of the year) and they are in the underworld when sun is in the underworld (cold part of the year)...I talked about this in my post "The chthonic animal"

Snakes are symbol of the sun and the sun's heat. They are also symbols of the beginning of summer, as vipers, the most common Eurasian snakes, start mating in Apr/May, beginning of summer...

And dragons, old snakes, are symbol of the old sun, destructive summer sun which burns the land and causes drought. Steals and guards water...Which is why in Slavic mythology, dragon, always breathes fire...

And which is why in the past, during spring droughts, Serbs used to go to mountain lakes, on St George's day, and pray for rain on lake shores "to the dragons living in the lake who swallowed the rain"...

I talked about this in my post "Dragon who stole rain"...

There is actually a Serbian belief that "a snake got wings when it lived over 100 years, after which it flew away to live in lakes and waters"...Just like a Dragon...

This is in addition to the belief from Ukraine and Poland that snakes once had wings and flew in the sky. But the sun burned their wings and they fell on the ground. I wrote about this in my article about Slavic belief in the link between snakes and sun...

Now, there is an interesting Slavic word "jar" which means young, green, spring...It is the root of the name of the Slavic sun god, Jarilo (pronounced Yahreeloh)...He is the life giving spring and early summer sun that brings back life to the frozen earth...Here is a depiction of Jarilo painted by Russian artist Andrey Shishkin...

Jarilo is the original Green Man...This is Zeleni Jura (Green Jarilo) walking the earth. Part of Jurjevanje, celebration of the spring return of Jarilo, Sun god, from the land of the dead...Bela Krajina, area inhabited by descendants of Serbians who migrated here during Turkish invasions of the Balkans. Today split between Croatia/Slovenia...

But the root "jar" can also mean "brightly burning" and "raging, furious"...

This means that Jarilo can also mean "The Scorcher", the life destroying burning sun of the late summer and early autumn...

Two suns, young and old, the life creator and life destroyer...In one...

Jurjevo, the celebration of the return of Jarilo, is today known as St George's day. St George is basically Christianised Jarilo...

Jurjevo is the celebration of the beginning of the summer, the domain of the sun...And dragons...Because as the summer goes on, and the sun gets hotter and hotter, snake, the symbol of sun's heat, grows older and older and eventually turns into dragon, the symbol of destructive sun's heat...

Jarilo, The Scorcher, The Dragon...To whom Serbs, sacrificed rams during droughts, on St George's day, with blood poured into the lake, for the dragon who stole rain...

Funny...

St George = Jarilo = Dragon...

By the way, Serbs believed that the Snake King, who is "An Old Male snake", The Dragon, also had a "green branch in his mouth"...

Interesting right? 

Snake King = Dragon = Jarilo = Green man...

By the way, the dragons who steal princesses in the Balkan fairytales usually live in palaces...They are kings...Snake kings...

I believe that Jurjevo, Jarilo's day, is at the same time the celebration of good spring sun and bad summer sun. The day of thanks for the spring and prayers for the summer...Anyway, on that day spring ends, summer begins...

And every year, on The Day of Jarilo, The Day of Dragon, the Young Spring Earth, Vesna, is "sacrificed" to the Young Sun, Jarilo (The Dragon). Spring (the princess) is "sacrificed" (it ends) so that Summer (The Dragon) can begin???

But wait, St George is a dragon killer!!! Well, what's the best way to Christianise Jarilo, The Sun, The Scorcher, The Dragon, than to turn it into it's opposite...The Dragon Killer...

In Serbian Orthodox church tradition, the beginning and the end of the "Time of Dragons", the hot sunny half of the year, is marked (guarded) by Two Georges, Summer and Winter St Georg (e's day)...I talked about this in my post "Two Georges"...

One very interesting thing. St George is mostly depicted riding a white horse when he is doing his dragon killing...

(White) Horse is one of the most widespread solar symbols. For instance, Slavic Sun god Svetovid, also rode on a white horse, and white horses were kept in his temples...I wrote about that in my post "Svetovid"...

Celtic solar horse coin. 

Articles about solar horse (equid)

Iran "Water carrier equid", "Dioscuri plate from Iran"

Mesopotamia "Shamash playing with the solar horse", "Sun god from Tell Brak"

India "Hayagriva"

China "Longma", "Three legged crow", "Mythical beast from Xian"

Levant "Alexamenos graffito", "Goddess on a horse", "Unicorn"

Europe "Archaic rider", "Beotian solar pyxis", "Pegasus and chimera", "King John", "The horseman"

We find white horse as a solar symbol even in Jarilo (pronounced Yareeloh) folklore (mythology) where Jarilo "arrives on a white horse"...

What is very interesting is that Radoslav Katičić and Vitomir Belaj, who attempted to reconstruct the mythology surrounding Jarilo, came to the conclusion that he had "equine characteristics", basically that he is both the (solar) rider and the (solar) horse...

From the Animal Calendar Markers point of view, this is pretty clear. The "solarness" 🙂 of equids and their link with Sun gods stems from the fact that horse fertility is governed by sunlight...It starts in Apr/May (start of summer, St George's day) and peaks on Summer Solstice. I talked about this in my post 

This is why...

Horse zodiac symbol is disguised as Dioskuri, divine twin horsemen. The guys who wanted to marry "the daughters of the white horse". They mark Summer Solstice, the peak of the horse mating season, characterised by wild stallion fights for mares...

I talked about this in my posts "Hayagriva", "Dioscuri plate from Iran"...

Anyway, this is also why in Slavic folklore, horse is a symbol for a "young groom"...Which is another disguise for Jarilo, in his "Young Spring Sun" phase, when he marries Vesna, Young Spring Earth....

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, which were the key to deciphering all this, check my blog posts related to animal calendar markers, and then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way behind now...

Yeti revisited

Two recent archaeological discoveries have, I think, added more support for my crazy idea from 2018: That Yeti stories could be old ancestral memories of the mixing between Modern and Denisovans humans on Tibetan plateau. I talked about this crazy idea in my post "Yeti"...

Here's the jist:

In 2010 geneticists discovered that Tibetans have several genes that help them use smaller amounts of oxygen efficiently, allowing them to deliver enough of it to their limbs while exercising at high altitude...

Most notable is a version of a gene called EPAS1, which regulates the body’s production of hemoglobin. These genes are not found in any other human population outside of Tibetan plateau...

Since this gene was discovered the scientists wandered where it came from. And then in 2014, while looking through the genes found in Denisovans DNA, they spotted EPAS1...

The mystery was solved. The "superathlete" gene, which helps Sherpas and other Tibetans breathe easily at high altitudes was inherited from Denisovans, one of the archaic human species now extinct...

But there was a problem. It was commonly accepted (at the time when I wrote this post) that Denisovans went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians about 40,000 years ago...

So the only time when Tibetans could have acquired EPAS1 gene is at that time. But it was also commonly accepted at the time of the discovery of that gene that the Tibetan plateau has only been inhabited by humans for around 15,000 years...

Now considering that Tibetan plateau population is the only one in the world which possesses the EPAS1 gene, it is most likely that they acquired it on the Tibetan plateau...

Which means that either Denisovans survived on the Tibetan plateau until 14,000 years ago (35,000 years longer then anywhere else in the world), or that modern humans arrived to Tibetan plateau much much earlier than originally thought...

And then in 2018, the Nwya Devu Paleolithic site was discovered, and it confirmed that human ancestors arrived on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at elevations approaching 5,000 meters above sea level around 30,000-40,000 years ago...

Which is what prompted me to write my Yeti article...

And this year, a newly discovered Denisovan remains in the Baishiya Karst Cave confirm that Denisovans indeed were still present on the Tibetan plateau between 48,000 to 32,000 years ago. The findings were published in Nature article "Middle and Late Pleistocene Denisovan subsistence at Baishiya Karst Cave"

So it turns out that modern humans did actually arrive to Tibet right on time to first intermix with Denisovans, acquiring the high altitude gene and then exterminate them...

Which is what Tibetan ancestral myths and the legends about Yeti might actually be talking about, as they both talk about interbreeding between humans and "hairy mountain creatures". Which would mean that these legends could be between 30,000 and 40,000 years old...

That ancestral myths and legends in isolated populations can indeed survive for a very very long time, can be seen from the legends about the Indonesian island of Flores about Ebu Gogo...

These creatures were said to sneak into human camps to steal children to try to cook and eat them. They were described as very small with broad faces, flat noses, and wide mouths...

Exactly like the now extinct hominid species labeled Homo Floresiensis, which lived on the island of Flores until humans arrived there around 50,000 years ago, and most likely exterminated them after a period of coexistence...

The memory of the coexistence of these two human species on the island of Flores survived in the ancestral myths about Ebu Gogo...Again among the isolated (this time island) population...

I already talked about another isolated population which also preserved ancient memories as ancestral myths over similarly ridiculous time periods in my post "Dreamtime" about Aboriginal dreamtime stories...

Some Australian Aboriginal "dreamtime" stories, passed orally from generation to generation, could actually be over 40,000 years ago...

This post was from 2016. Again, most people just shook their heads and said that no story can survive that long...

But this year's discovery of a 12,000 years old ritual burial in Australia, which was performed in exactly the same way local Aboriginal people still buried their dead in the 19th century, confirms that rituals can survive unchanged for 12,000 years. 

Now rituals are practical manifestations of beliefs, myths, which means that this is a proof that the ancestral myths survived unchanged in this isolated population for at least 12,000 years...

I already wrote that belief systems, of which rituals are a practical manifestation, can survive for a very long time in my post "Third death" about the Cuvash "third death" ritual burials which have not changed for past 4000+ years, which are performed "when two people from the same family suddenly die one after another"...And why archaeologists should study folklore of their archaeological site area...

I know 4000 years is "not that long" (it's actually fu*king long) compared to 12,000 years, but it shows that this survival of a rituals over vast time span is not a freak isolated case...

Are there any other legends and rituals that are this old? Definitely...This is my favourite:

How old are legends about "the hunt for the firebird"? Well they could predate the time when people learned how to make fire...Which is an awful long time...Because before people knew how to make it, fire descended from the sky and had to be found and caught...

Lapis lazuli water seal

I would like to analyse the scene depicted on this Lapis lazuli seal, made between 2400BC and 2000BC in Eastern Iran. Currently in the British Museum. 

It is actually quite amazing...

So what is depicted on this seal? Well, I think that this is a calendar, which depicts the wet season in Eastern Iran, using animal calendar markers: Goat, animal calendar marker for Oct/Nov and Bull, animal calendar marker for Apr/May...Let me show you why...

This is the map of Iran. On it I circled Eastern Iran and I underlined the 4 main cities in the region: Mashhad, Birjand, Kerman and Zahedan...

These are precipitation charts for these 4 main cities in Eastern Iran...

You can see that the wet season in Eastern Iran starts in Oct/Nov and ends in Apr/May...

Mating season of Ibex Goats starts in Oct/Nov...Which is why Ibex became animal calendar marker for Oct/Nov. And cause this is when the rains arrive to Western Asia and Eastern Mediterranean, Ibex there became The Goat of Rain...

I talked about symbolism of ibex goats in many of my posts, like 

Europe:

"Pitys", "Goat in European culture", "Patera of Rennes"... 

Levant:

"The tree of life/light", "Lachish animal calendar"...

Mesopotamia:

"Feast plaque from Louvre", "Green pastures", "Problems with Abzu", "Relief from Dur Sharrukin", "Goatfish"...

Iran: 

"Flamingos from Susa", "Goat carrier", "Iranian goat of rain", "Strider", "A vessel from Tepe Hissar"...

In Iran in particular, Ibex Goat was the most depicted animal during Neolithic and Bronze Age...I talked about this in my post "Goat petroglyphs from Iran"...

So that's the Goat sorted...

What about the Bull? Normally, as the animal calendar marker for Apr/May, the end of the wet season in Western Asian and Eastern Mediterranean, we find an Auroch bull or a calf.

You know, Taurus...Taurus here is "the old Taurus", an animal calendar marker, which only later became mapped to whatever constellation was rising with the sun during Apr/May, when constellations were first defined...

Taurus originally had nothing to do with stars. Taurus marked Apr/May, the beginning of the calving of Eurasian wild cattle. I talked about that in my posts "Ram and bull", "Cow and calf ivory", "Lotus and papyrus", "Bull carrying grannary", "Foundation peg of the goddess nanshe", "Cypriot stamp seals with cow and calf"...and many others...

I talked about this in my post "Feast plaque from Louvre" about this amazing object I discovered during the 5 hour long stroll I took with my son through the Mesopotamian section of the Louvre museum few years ago. 

Perforated votive limestone plaque, Mesopotamia (where?), ca. 2700-2650BC...

Now interestingly, the bull depicted on our Lapis seal is not Auroch...It's a Zebu...That's interesting. Zebu originates in India...From where it spread westward...I talked about this in this post "Zebu migrations"...

Because of its mating habits (it mates during the wet season in India), in the Indus Valley civilisation the zebu cattle was used as an animal calendar marker for the Kharif (wet season) Apr/May - Oct/Nov. I talked about this in my post "Kharif and Rabi seasons" about this amazing vessel from the Indus Valley civilisation...

So it seems that on our Lapis seal, it was the beginning of the mating season of Zebu cattle and not the beginning of the calving season of Auroch cattle, that was used as an animal calendar marker for the end of the rain season (Apr/May)...

Now let's see how my interpretation fits with the official description of the seal: 

Two figures faced each other, one holding a cup...The pattern above the figures "may represent rain clouds and rain"...Ibex goat and Zebu bull depicted to the side...

See...

Rain is on ancient artefacts often depicted using dots. I talked about this already in my post "Goat of rain from Andros" about the Neolithic relief depicting the goat of rain surrounded by dots (rain drops) from the Cycladic island of Andros in Greece

Knowing what we know about the symbolism of the goat and the bull, I am 110% convinced that the pattern above the figures represent rain clouds and rain. 

The makers of this seal even positioned one of the dots (rain drops) above the cup, to make it clear what the dots mean...

What about the "drinking from a cup" scene...Have a look at this: Seated female figure (goddess? ) drinking out of a very similar cup (goblet) sitting next to a tulip, bronze seal, late 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC, (BMAC), Afghanistan...

Now check the map of Iran. Our Iranian lapis seal was found in Eastern Iran...Next door to BMAC land...

In my post "Tulip goddess" about the BMAC Goddess with tulips seal, I explained that the goddess is the young spring earth, who just had her first period (snowmelt) and is drinking water (runoff)...

...while around here wild tulips flower everywhere...

The two main rivers from Eastern Iran, Atrak and Helmand, are both fed by the rain and snowmelt. Their water discharge starts suddenly rising in Oct/Nov, it peaks in Apr/May, and it suddenly drops to nothing in Jun/Jul...

Also, the fact that our seal from Eastern Iran was made from Lapis Lazuli, The Water Stone, also points to the intended meaning of the seal scene: rain, filling our cups with fresh water between the mating of Ibex goats and mating of Zebu Cattle...

I talked about this lapis as the water stone in my post "Solar bull"....

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...

Goat of rain from Andros

This is a very interesting thread about the Late Neolithic settlement (4500-3300 BC) on the Greek island of Andros in the Cyclades...

The thread is full of great info and pics of the site and of the artefacts found on the site. 

One artefact being particularly cool...This one: it is an engraved stone, which if I am not mistaken, depicts an Ibex goat, surrounded by dots...

On ancient artefacts from Eastern Mediterranean, dots were used to depict rain, rain drops...And Ibex goat was used to depict the rain season...Cause the start of the mating season of Ibex goats (Oct/Nov) coincides with the start of the rain season the area...

Andros climate chart...

This makes this artefacts very very interesting indeed...

I talked about symbolism of ibex goats in many of my posts, like 

Europe:

"Pitys", "Goat in European culture", "Patera of Rennes"... 

Levant:

"The tree of life/light", "Lachish animal calendar"...

Mesopotamia:

"Feast plaque from Louvre", "Green pastures", "Problems with Abzu", "Relief from Dur Sharrukin", "Goatfish"...

Iran: 

"Flamingos from Susa", "Goat carrier", "Iranian goat of rain", "Strider", "A vessel from Tepe Hissar"...

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...

Siberian smith god

Two of many similar figures made by the people of the Kulai culture, which thrived along the Ob River and its tributaries in western Siberia between the 5th century BC and the 5th century CE. From "Frozen magic, the ancient art of Siberia"...

According to the authors of the "Frozen magic, the ancient art of Siberia": The most distinctive feature of these figures is the disproportionate human form. It is unlikely that this effect was unintentional and was probably done to emphasise that we are dealing with a deity... 

The figure have a limping stance, a consistent trait among all known figures in this style. Ancient artisans intentionally crafted one leg shorter than the other, creating a deliberate asymmetry that contrasts with the figure’s symmetrical facial features... 

The authors of the "Frozen magic, the ancient art of Siberia" then propose that these figures might depict a limping blacksmith deity, that fits the common archetype found in other mythologies...  

Mythological figures such as the Greek Hephaestus, Scandinavian Völund, Scythian Targitaus, and the celestial blacksmith Kurdalagon of the Ossetian-Nart people all share a limp. BTW, if you want to know why they are all limping, check my post "Vučedol dove" out...

The gist is that the first, most primitive form of bronze made was arsenic bronse. Arsenic is extremely poisonous, and it gets released into the air from the molten metal in a form of toxic fumes... 

The first sigh of arsenic poisoning is the loss of the sensation in the legs, which then expands throughout the body and finally leads to death...Therefore forging this metal was a dangerous job... 

But if you got out of your workshop on time, then the danger passed, although limping due to loss of sensation in the legs remained for some time...Sounds familiar so far? A lame, limping smith...

Anyway, the authors of the "Frozen magic, the ancient art of Siberia" then go to say that this deity is obviously connected to the underworld...Because both fish and lizard are chthonic animals...

Eeeee what? 

I would first like to agree that this figure is most likely a blacksmith deity. I would then like to propose that this is also a solar deity. Why? Cause of Svarog (Сваро́гъ) is a Slavic god of celestial fire and the father of Dažbog, Slavic sun god... 

Svarog was in the 15th c. Hypatian Codex, a Slavic translation of the Chronicle of John Malalas, equated with Hephaestus, which means that he was not only the god of sun's fire but also of the smith (crucibel) fire...His name comes from the root "svar" which means fire...

Interestingly, Dažbog, who is among Serbs known as Dabog, was imagined as a lame, limping god...He was also the god of the underworld...Strange for a sun god to be the god of the underworld, I hear you say...

No, not really...Where does the sun spend every night? Where is the sun's palace, whose gate the morning star opens up every morning so the sun can drive his chariots into our world? It's in the underworld, the land of the dead, of course... 

So I also agree that the strange objects made by the people of the Kulai culture depict a deity which is connected to the underworld. But not because "fish and lizard are chthonic animals"...They are not. They are animal calendar markers for the hot half of the year...

Lizards are obvious animal calendar markers for summer. They are cold blooded creatures, which are only outside when the outside temperature gets high enough to warm their blood. Siberian lizards emerge from hibernation in Apr and mate in May/Jun... 

I talked about lizard as an animal calendar marker for summer in my post "Bes" about Onega Lage petroglyphs...

This is also a great example of lizard being used as an animal calendar marker for the hot half of the year. 

A (strange) griffin killing a lizard. 6th century mosaic, Great Palace Museum, Istanbul. Another complex animal calendar marker, this one depicting cold half of the year killing (ending) hot half of the year. Full analysis of the symbolism in my post "Griffin killing lizard"...

So that's lizard. What about fish? 

The people of the Kulai culture who made these strange figurines lived along the Kazym river, the right tributary of Ob river. The Kazym river is fed mainly by snow. It freezes in early November and begins to thaw in late May.

Which is when Taimen, the biggest salmonoid in the world, starts its upstream spawning migration towards the upper reaches of the small tributaries where they spawn in the shallows in May/Jun. 

I talked about migratory fish used as animal calendar marker in my post "Pisces". 

25000 years ago a Palaeolithic man carved salmon into the ceiling of a cave near the Vézère River in France. Why? Because in the past, salmon fishing season, which starts in Pisces (fish) 🙂 was one of the main food gathering seasons in Continental Europe

I also talked about migratory fish used as animal calendar marker in my post "The dragon gate" about jumping carp from China. Porcelain Dish c.1700, depicting the Chinese legend about The Dragon Gate. If a carp manages to swim up Yellow River and climb up the waterfall to the gate and jump through it, it will turn into a thunder and lightning dragon.

And in my post "Apkallu" about the giant Mesopotamian carps which migrate upstream for spawing every year during the annual flood season . 

Gold and lapis lazuli carps found in the grave of the Sumerian Queen Puabi who was buried in Ur around 2500BC...Gold for sun and blue for water...About Mesopotamian carp, carp flood, Enki and his Apkallu...

So both of the animals depicted on the strange oval heads of the Kulai culture figures are animal calendar markers for the beginning of summer in Siberia. So I would suggest that the reason why these figures have such huge heads is because they are supposed to symbolise summer sun...

Ok...But what does any of this have to do with metallurgy and smith gods? Well, as it turns out, in the past, in areas with continental climate with a lot of snow, metallurgy was a seasonal activity performed during the summer. I talked about it in my post "Mishipeshu" about the Ancient Native Americans coppersmiths from the great lakes. 

It's kind of obvious, when you think about it. In the past ore was mostly extracted either from shallow shafts, or from river sediments. Both of which are during the winter covered with pile of snow and ice and inacessible. Also it is impossible to work outside on -50 C...

Hence Siberian lame sun smith god figurines decorated with fish and lizard, the two animal calendar markers for the beginning of the metallurgical season in Siberia...What do you think? Makes sense?

BTW, it just occurred to me why Bronze Age Vučedol culture smith could have had this partridge/dove figurine in his forge: both birds are symbol of spring, animal calendar markers for the beginning of the metallurgical season in the Balkans...

The reason we don't know exactly what bird it is:

Native Balkan dove

Native Balkan partridge

See what I mean?

But what we know is that Partridge is in Greek myths directly linked to lame smiths, like Hephaestus...Dove is linked to Aphrodite...

Hmmmm...

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...