When grapes flower

5th c. BC Etruscan terracotta head of young Turms/Mercury/Hermes, from the Temple of Portonaccio at Veio, Italy...Stunning...

Talking about Hermes, I would like to ask a stupid question: When was Hermes born?

If you ask google this, it will tell you that: "His birthday is known for being the fourth day of the month, and his sacred number is four"...Eeee amazing. Fourth day of what month? And this is where google stays silent...Cause apparently, WE DON'T KNOW...Actually we do...

If we open "Homeric hymn 4 to Hermes", the text that talks about Hermes's birth, we will see why that it says: [Hermes was] "born with the dawning...on the fourth day of the month..." Without mention which month it was...So google is not lying...

But this text actually tells us in which month Hermes was born. Just not directly...Let's look at the above sentence about Hermes's birth again: "Born with the dawning...and in the evening he stole the cattle of far-shooting Apollo, on the fourth day of the month..."

So on the fourth day of yet unknown month Hermes was running through a grassy plain with stolen Apollo's sacred cattle, when he noticed that "...an old man tilling his flowering vineyard saw him..."

When Hermes noticed that he was spotted committing his first crime, he came to the old man and basically told him: "you should strictly remember not to have seen what you have seen, and not to have heard what you have heard, and to keep silent" or else...

And then he ran off with the stolen cattle towards the river Alpheus, where he had to invent fire-drill (stole fire from the gods???) so he could light the "first fire" to make "the first burnt sacrifice" to the gods. I talked about this in my post "12 Olympians"...

Anyway, when later that evening, while looking for his stolen cattle, Apollo came across the same old man "tilling his flowering vineyard", the old man of course told him everything he had seen and heard, which helped Apollo to identify the thief, find his stole cattle...

And there you have it. Hidden in plain sight, again, is the information we need: the month in which Hermes was born in...Do you see it? I'll wait a bit 🙂 ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta, the girl from Ipanema goes walking...

Grape "flowering occurs when average daily temperatures stay between 15–20 °C which in the Northern Hemisphere wine regions is generally around May..."

So, if the old man, who witnessed the theft of the Apollo cattle by Hermes on Hermes's birth day, was indeed "...tilling his flowering vineyard..." then Hermes's birthday was the 4th of May...

This is interesting cause the month of May (Latin Maius) was supposedly named after Maia, who in ancient Roman religion and myth, "embodied the concept of growth" (her name was thought to come from the comparative adjective maius, maior "larger, greater")...

She was identified with Earth (Terra, the Roman counterpart of Gaia) and the Good Goddess (Bona Dea)...

But also with the Greek Maia, who in the Ancient Greek religion, was one of the Pleiades...And the mother of Hermes...

Now the old man saw Hermes running "down the plain through grassy Onchestus..." a town in ancient Boeotia...

And Hesiod, who lived in Boeotia in the 8th c. BC wrote that the grain harvest should start when Pleiades rise with the sun. Which in Hesiod's time occurred...around the first week of May...When Maia, one of the Pleiades, gives birth to Hermes...I talked about this in my post "Hesiod on grain"...

By the way, the first week in May falls in the middle of Taurus, the period when Eurasian wild cattle used to start their calving season...Which is what bull animal calendar marker represents since Neolithic, all over Eurasia and north Africa...I talked about this in my post "Cow and calf ivory"...And considering that this occurs at the same time when grain is harvested, we have the link between bulls and grain...I talked about this in my posts: "Bulls and grain bowl", "Scarlet-ware harvest vase", "How grain came to Sumer", "Three bulls and grain"...

Interestingly, Hemes seems to have only stolen cows from the Apollo's herd, not bulls...Is this significant? I don't know, but weren't Pleiades, which rise with the sun at the exact time when sun god's cows were stolen by Hermes, also known as heavenly herd?

And so in the end I don't think this was such a stupid question...Cause knowing when Hermes was born helps us understand few other very important things about him...Like his true nature...

🙂 But I think this is enough for tonight...More tomorrow...Sweet dreams...

PS: 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...