Dance of the Panes

Athenian red-figure skyphos (wine cup) dated to 5th BC, currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston depicting: "Goddess emerging from the ground between two [dancing/prancing] Pans"...

Which goddess?

I would suggest Persephone. Here's why:

Abduction of Persephone by Hades. Fresco from, Vergina, 340 BC, Macedonia, Greece. Based on the animal and plant calendar markers found in the story about the abduction of Persephone, which I presented in my post "Abduction of Persephone", this abduction took place in Oct/Nov...

This is interesting because it is at the precise moment when Persephone (the grain seed) is abducted and taken to the "underworld", in Oct/Nov, that winter grains, barley and wheat, were sown in Ancient Greece...

Here comes one of my favourite bits of the legend of the abduction of Persephone.

"Demeter, when she found her daughter had disappeared, disguised herself as an old woman and with lighted torched in her hands roamed the Earth looking for her daughter..."

How long was she doing this? Well the Homeric Hymn of Demeter says: 

"Thereafter, for nine days did the Lady Demeter wander all over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her hands."

On the tenth day, Hekate came to Demeter and told her that Helios (the sun) knows where her daughter was...

Why nine days?

If we see Persephone as grain seed, then she indeed spend only 9 days in The Underworld, Under The Ground...

This diagram shows the life cycle of the winter grains (wheat and barley). You can see that after sowing, the seed germinates and sprouts within 10 days...After 10 days the first grain leafs appear above the ground...

Is this why the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is so precise about number of days Demeter was looking for her daughter? I think so...

Anyway, just before Persephone was released from the underworld, Hades tricked her, giving her some pomegranate seeds to eat. And because she had tasted "food in The Underworld", she was obliged to return to underworld every year...

The pomegranate picking season starts in Oct/Nov and lasts until January, basically spanning the whole of winter. It is no wonder then that pomegranate is considered a symbol of Winter and Christmas in Greece...

So if Hades did give Persephone pomegranate to eat, he could only have given it to her in Oct/Nov, after she has spend 9 days in the underworld...

Guess what else happens in Oct/Nov, at the time when Persephone emerges from the underworld, her lips still sticky with pomegranate (fertility symbol) juice? 

The mating season of Ibex goats starts. Matins season during which bucks "dance/prance", actually fight for females...

Ibex mating (dancing/prancing) season spans the whole of winter...This is why goat is the symbol of winter.

An illustration by Yuri Vasnetsov from 1956 entitled "Goat". It depicts the scene from Slavic folklore in which goat (of winter) brings spring (basket with flowers) and summer (baby goat).    

You can read more about goat (calendar marker) in European folklore and mythology in my post "Goat in European culture"...

Back to our skyphos....The two dancing/prancing panes flanking the emerging goddess have goat heads...Sooo...Is this what is depicted on this vase? Grain sprouting from the ground in Oct/Nov, during goat mating season? I think so...But there is more...

This is the other side of the same skyphos. On it we see the same goddess, this time fully out of the ground, holding a skyphos and a thyrsus, holy staff of Dionysus, flanked by two Panes, this time with human heads and horse tails, one of whom also holds a thyrsus...

The fact that it is horse Panes and not goat Panes that flank fully emerged, moving goddess, indicate that here we are looking at Summer Persephone, Demeter, the harvested grain...

Actually I would even suggest that we are looking at threshed and winnowed grain...

According to Hesiod in Ancient Greece, grain harvest was done in Apr/May/Jun, and threshing and winnowing was done in Jun/Jul around the time of the summer solstice...I talked about this in my post "Hesiod on grain"...

Guess what starts in Apr/May (start of grain harvest in Ancient Greece) and peaks in Jun/Jul (end of grain winnowing in Ancient Greece)? Horse matings season, during which stallions "dance/prance", actually fight for females...

The horse fertility is governed by the sunlight and peaks on summer solstice. 

Hence solar horses all over Eurasia...

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"

Which is why horses are an animal calendar marker for summer, and summer solstice. Horse is hidden among zodiac symbols as The Devine Horse Twins...Dioscuri...

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

The peak of the horse dancing/prancing, Summer Solstice, is the time when giant fennel, a wild flowering plant that can grow up to 2.5 meters tall, flowers in Greece, producing huge number of large bright yellow globular "sun like" flowers...

Giant fennel whose stalk is used as a shaft of Thyrsus, the sacred staff of Dionysus. I talked about this in my post "Thyrsus"...

Thyrsus carried by both moving Persephone (winnowing grain seed) and dancing/prancing horse Panes who flank her...

Isn't this interesting? So is this what the other side of the skyphos depicts? Moving Persephone (grain being winnowed) holding thyrsus (giant fennels) while dancing/prancing (mating) horses Panes are flanking her, in Jun/Jul...I think so...

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...

Seahorse ring

I posted this as a tweet a while back:

This is the "Ring of Minos", a Minoan gold seal ring, dated to c. 1500–1400 BC. 

And I asked if this was an inverted horse's head on the boat's prow? 

I then went on to talk about Phoenician boats with horse heads

And Phoenician and Greek sea gods who loved horses

And what mating season of horses has to do with all this...

In short, the mating season of wild horses, Apr/May-Sep/Oct, marked by the violent stallion fights for mares, coincides with the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean. Basically, in the maritime mythology of the Eastern Mediterranean, horse was used as an animal calendar marker for the beginning of the sailing season. You can read all this in my posts: "Trojan horse" and "Three sacrifices"...

Then someone replied to my twitter thread and said that the animal head on the prow of the Minoan ship actually looked very much like a seahorse head. 

So, what about seahorses as animal calendar markers?

Until today I haven't really looked at seahorses at all...But I did just now, and what I found is actually quite interesting indeed...

Two species live in the Mediterranean Sea: 

H. guttulatus (the long-snouted seahorse)

H. hippocampus (the short-snouted seahorse)

And, it turned out that "for most seahorses breeding season lasts between Apr and Oct and is related to environmental temperature"...

Funny that terrestrial horses mate between Apr and Sep...

April, the beginning of the mating season of both horse species coincides with the start of the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean...

Because this is when the winter storms end and the trading winds start to blow. 

As I already said, spotting the beginning of the horses mating season is quite easy, because you can't miss the stallions all of a sudden starting to fight for the right to mate with mares...And you can't miss what happens after these fights either...🙂

But I don't know if our ancestors knew very much about the mating season of seahorses...Possibly...Most seahorse species, including Mediterranean ones, live in shallow sheltered waters of seagrass beds, estuaries, coral reefs, up to 15m in dept. So they could have noticed this...

They were fishermen who lived off the seas, and knew the wildlife in shallow waters well...And so what they must have noticed, is appearance of seahorses in the shallow coastal waters in the spring and their disappearance from the shallows in the autumn...

As I said, most seahorse species live in very shallow coastal waters. 

But, during winter months, they move to deeper water, up to 77 m deep, mostly because of the storms...

Which batter the coast and would crash them to death.

According to seahorse lifecycle data that I could find, seahorses usually appear in the shallows by late April to early May depending on the sea temperature and go into deeper water by mid-October at the latest...

These dates sound familiar? 🙂

So our ancestors living by the sea and fishing the shallow estuarine waters full of fish, would have noticed that as the winter storms started to calm down, seahorses started appearing in their nets as the bycatch...

And that as the weather started getting more and more unsettled around the beginning of winter, our ancestor fishermen/seamen would have noticed that seahorses disappeared from their nets...

And the period between appearance and disappearance of seahorses was the time to go sailing in Eastern Mediterranean...

I have to admit that I couldn't find data specifically for Mediterranean, but all the sources say that seahorses migrate to deeper waters for the winter...

So I would be very grateful if anyone can get hold of any info on seahorse seasonal migrations from Greece or Turkey...

And that's it...Terrestrial horse or Sea horse, it makes no difference from the animal calendar marker point of view, if you wanted to use a horse to mark the beginning of the sailing season in Eastern Mediterranean...

How cool is this? 🙂

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...