Cygnus

When Apollo was born, "swans circled Delos seven times"...Young Sun God is born on winter solstice...And during second millennium BC, the formative period of the Greek mythology, Cygnus (Swan) constellation rose with the sun around winter solstice. Source: Stellarium app

The Swans of Apollo were "Singing swans" which "when the singers would sing hymns to Apollo, would join the chant in unison"...The only swans that "sing" are whooper swans...

These are migratory birds, which spend warm, sunny half of the year (Mar/Apr/May-Oct/Nov) in the northern regions of Eurasia, and cold, dark half of the year (Oct/Nov-Mar/Apr/May) in the southern (Greece) and western (Ireland) regions of Eurasia...

Which is why in Greece we find "Singing swans" linked to the birth of the Young Sun God Apollo at winter solstice...I talked about this in my post "The singers of Apollo"...

And why "swans always hovered over the head of Aengus", The Young God, who is said to reside "for one night and one day" inside Newgrange, Neolithic temple built in Ireland to capture the rising sun on day of the Winter Solstice. I talked about this in my post "The young one"...

This is also why the Old Sun God (which became The Devil) from Neolithic Karelia (North of Russia) was depicted standing between swans arriving from the land of the dead in the Spring and departing to the land of the dead in the autumn...

Land of the dead, according to the local folklore, being "somewhere south-west"...Where migratory whooper swans spend winters...I talked about this in my post "Bes"...

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...

Singers of Apollo

Ancient Greek coin minted in Clazomenai in the early 4th c. BC, depicting the head of Apollo and his sacred bird, swan...

In 4th c. AD, Himerius in his Orations talks about the hymn to Apollo written by the 6th c. BC Greek poet Alcaeus. Here is the interesting bit:

"When Apollo was born, Zeus equipped him with golden headband and lyre and gave him also a chariot of swans to drive, and sent him to Delphi...to declare justice and right for the Greeks..."

"...but when Apollo mounted the chariot he directed the swans to fly to the land of the Hyperboreans..."

Why?

Well there is something very peculiar about Apollo's swans that might give us a (non mythological) answer to this question...

In Hymn to Delos, Callimachus says that swans circled the island of Delos seven times while Apollo was being born...Now these were not just any swans. These were singing swans...

These "birds of Apollo" were considered to be "the most musical among the birds", and were also called "singers of Apollo". The Roman author, Aelian said that "when the singers would sing hymns to Apollo, the swans would join the chant in unison"...

This is strange, considering that all the swans in Europe are mute...

All except one species: "the whooper swans"..."noisy birds...whose call is like a loud honk of a car"...

The whooper swans live and breed in far North of Eurasia (yellow). They winter in Southern and Western Europe (Blue, Green)...

They usually migrate to their winter territories around October and arrive back in their breeding territory in April.

So the singing whooper swans, were, at the time when all these hymns to Apollo were written, only found in Greece between October and April...

And in April, they would gather into flocks, fly overhead singing, and then depart towards "Hyperborea"...Taking with them Apollo in his new swan chariot...

I think this is kind of neat...

There's more...

Alcaeus, in his hymn to Apollo also says that "when the Delphians learned that Apollo went to Hyperborea, they [prayed and] called on the god to come back..."

"...Apollo, however, delivered law among the men of that region for a full year; but when he thought it was time...he ordered his swans to fly back again from the Hyperboreans...and it was summer and indeed the very middle of summer when Apollo came back from the Hyperboreans..."

This of course can happen in mythology...In reality, Apollo's swan chariot could only come back to Greece in October, during whooper swans winter southward migration...

This part of Alcaeus's hymn is very interesting, cause it actually confirms that it was indeed in October that Apollo "ordered his swans to fly back again from the Hyperboreans":

"When Apollo returned from Hyperborea, Kephisos (Cephisus) [a river of Phokis and Boiotia] rises in flood surging with waves...for...even the water could sense the presence of [the] god..."

Now I don't know if we are talking about the same Kephisos, but "The oldest tradition in the region now called Argolis is that once three rivers Inakhos, Kephisos and Asterion, judged who should rule the land, Poseidon or Hera..."

"They decided that it belonged to Hera, and so Poseidon made their waters disappear. For this reason neither of these rivers provides any water except after rain. In summer their streams are dry..."

So in reality Cephisus could not have flooded during "mid summer"...Here is the climate in Peloponnesus. See, dry summer...

So when does Cephisus "rises in flood surging with waves"? Well, in this article entitled "An inventory of flood events in Athens, Greece, during the last 130 years. Seasonality and spatial distribution" there is this chart showing "Monthly distribution of flood events in Athens basin (1880–2010)" of the Kifisos river...Guess when it's most likely for Kifisos river to flood...Oct/Nov of course...

I couldn't find any other similarly named river...But even if Cephisus and Kifisos are not the same river, they are rivers from the same locality and the same climate and will have the same water flow...

So the only time when river Cephisus could "rise in flood surging with waves" to welcome Apollo arriving back from Hyperborea in his chariot pulled by singing swans, was exactly when whooper swans come to Greece, in October...

Strangely, in Greek mythology, Apollo spends winter in Hyperborea and summers in Greece, the opposite from happens in nature...He must have used some other means of transport in order to achieve that...

PS: In order for Apollo to hitch the ride to Hyperborea on a swan chariot, he had to be born before the whooper swan departure in April...And not on the seventh day of the month Thargelion, which corresponds to May/Jun...Just saying...So maybe I should look into his birth more closely to see if there is anything else that can help us pinpoint the actual date of his birth...

Woman with torches and swans

Sometimes I wonder...

This is a Boeotian (5th-4th c BC) red-figure bell-krater. Athens, National Archaeological Museum. Depicting a woman holding two torches and a swan...The identity of the woman and the overall meaning of the scene "unknown"...

The discussion about these craters can be found in the paper entitled "Swan Riddles in Boeotian Red-figure Vase Painting" by Chrstina Avronidaki.

Is it possible that this woman is Demeter who "carried a pair of flaming torches in her search for her daughter Persephone".

Persephone was abducted by Hades and taken to the land of the dead. During her search, grief stricken Demeter, mourning the disappearance (death) of her daughter, forbade plants to grow...

This is normally interpreted as winter, the darkest part of the year (torches) when nature is dormant (no plants grow)...It is during the winter that whooper swans migrate to Greece from Northern Europe. 

I talked about this in my post "The young one"...

But are these swans depicted on the craters whooper swans which are migratory, or mute swans which are resident birds in Greece? In "Swan Riddles in Boeotian Red-figure Vase Painting", Chrstina Avronidak says: "Although the swans represented on the Boeotian red-figure examples appear to belong to the Mute Swan species, ancient writers did not differentiate between Mutes and Whoopers, which were and still are to be found in Greece...". This is based on "...Their S-shaped neck curve and bulging bill base are characte-ristic of the species. For the main differences between the Mute (Cygnus olor) and the Whooper Swan (Cygnus cygnus)..."

I am not so sure that we can definitely say which swan species is depicted on these Ancient Greek vessels. Here are both mute and whooper swan side by side. 

Both birds seem to have S-shaped necks, with mute swan admittedly having more curved one. Also Mute swan has a very distinctive large bulge on their beaks while the whooper swan has pretty straight beak...

The swans depicted on these Ancient Greek craters have beaks which are something in between

The fact that Greeks didn't distinguish between different species of swans and believed that "all swans sing when they are dying" leads me to believe that when we are talking about swan symbolism we need to look at whooping swans...

Chrstina Avronidak says that there is a "tentative" proposal that the woman with torches could be Hecate, the Witch who helped Demeter find Persephone...Here we have Persephone (Spring), Demeter (Summer, Autumn) and Hecate (Winter), the three faces of Mother Earth all joined together...

Persephone is Demeter is Hecate...

That the swan on the original crater was a whooping swan used as a symbol o winter, can be seen from this next vessel. Boeotian black-figure calyx-krater. Bonn, Akademisches Kunstmuseum. The torch-bearing woman on this black-figure krater was identified as Demeter. However apparently this is "questionable"...The bird is identified as as Crane...

And here is something interesting I only fund out today. For Ancient Greeks, swallows were the heralds of Spring, as they were the first migrating birds to return from Africa. I talked about this in my article "Herald of spring"... 

But it seems that for the Ancient Greeks cranes were the heralds of winter, because they were the last birds to migrate to Africa...And it is during the winter that Demeter wanders through the dark holding her torches searching for her dead young self... 

I wonder what is the plant the goddess is holding in her hands? 

Olive? Olive harvest starts at the end of autumn beginning of winter...

Grain? Grain sowing starts at the end of autumn beginning of winter...

Both are directly linked to the part of the Persephone story when Demeter searches for her carrying torches...As I explained in my article about the "Abduction of Persephone"...

So I wonder...