What does this pendant represent?
The constellation of Pleiades (also known as seven sisters or seven maidens) lies on the neck of the constellation Taurus (bull)...
According to old writers, for instance Virgil book 4, bees only collect honey between the helical rising and setting of Pleiades (May to November). Funnily this period spans 7 months, the same number as the number of stars (bees or maiden sisters) of the constellation of Pleiades...
But its only worth collecting honey at end of the summer flow if you dont want to kill the hive. But then again If you just grab some comb any time after Mid July would be good.
ReplyDeleteThe Japanese have a traditional calendar (based on Chinese I think) that divides the solar year into 24 and again by 3 in to 72. Each 5 day period being allocated a weather or nature event or human activity. You can see some of it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar but I have a calendar with the finer divisions. Blossom times, insect noises, fish runs, bird arrivals etc are all carefully outlined. I wonder if such a calendar existed in Europe too. There may have been a crisis of phenology (caused by climate change) or simply a lack of enough events in the cold north so that there was a search for a more fixed calendar and the sun and stars were found to give a fixed record of the year. So that whether this bird sang or not, you would know that the time to right to hunt this other animal. These event seem fixed for centuries but then suddenly change. We are seeing one such small change now in the UK where some events are moving 2 weeks forward, while others stay the same. Once you hit upon the sun and stars you find all sorts of anomalies to investigate. And since your life depends on it; mystery upon mystery to muddle though.
Have a look at my posts about zodiac signs. Zodiac was, I am now convinced, invented in Neolithic Europe, was solar based and not star base, and marked significant natural events which were important to our ancestors...
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