Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

But they wheeled about Him, and with new-found voices mocked, crying, “How could we see into your heart that is hidden” ... and mocked and derided, crying, “What is Peace!... Leave us alone! Leave us alone!”

So Christ said to them:

“I know you for the birds of Ahriman, who is not beautiful but is Evil. Henceforth ye shall be black as night, and be children of the winds.”

To the seven other birds which circled about Him, voiceless, and brushing their wings against His arms, He cried:

“Look into my heart.”

And they swerved and hung before Him in a maze of wings, and looked into His pure heart: and, as they looked, a soft murmurous sound came from them, drowsy-sweet, full of peace: and as they hung there like a breath in frost they became white as snow.

“Ye are the Doves of the Spirit,” said Christ, “and to you I will commit that which ye have seen. Henceforth shall your plumage be white and your voices be the voices of peace.”

The young Christ turned, for He heard Mary calling to the sheep and goats, and knew that dayset was come and that in the valleys the gloaming was already rising like smoke from the urns of the twilight. When He looked back He saw by the pool neither the Son of Joy nor the Son of Sorrow, but seven white doves were in the cedar beyond the pool, cooing in low ecstasy of peace and awaiting through sleep and dreams the rose-red pathways of the dawn. Down the long grey reaches of the ebbing day He saw seven birds rising and falling on the wind, black as black water in caves, black as the darkness of night in old pathless woods.

* * * * *

And that is how the first doves became white, and how the first crows became black and were called by a name that means the clan of darkness, the children of the wind.

STILL WATERS

Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty of still waters at once so obvious and so ethereal as in Autumn. All the great painters of Nature have realised this crowning secret of their delicate loveliness. Corot exclaimed to a friend who was in raptures about one of his midsummer river scenes ... ‘Yes, yes, but to paint the soul of October, _voilà mon idéal_!’ Daubigny himself, that master of slow winding waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had to be only one month out of his studio it would have to be October, ‘for then you can surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then you may learn her most evanescent and most exquisite secrets.’ And our own Millais, when he was painting ‘Chill October’ near Murthly, in Perthshire, wrote that nothing had ever caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever given him so much pleasure, in the painting, ‘for Nature now can be found in a trance, and you can see her as she is.’ A friend of the late Keeley Halswelle told me that this able artist (who was originally a ‘figure’ and ‘subject’ painter) remarked to him that he had never realised the supreme charm of autumnal Nature among still waters till he found himself one day trying to translate to his canvas the placid loveliness of the wide, shallow reaches of the Avon around Christchurch. Doubtless many other painters, French and Dutch and English, have felt thus, and been glad to give their best to the interpretation of the supreme charm of still waters in autumn. What would Venice be without them ... Amsterdam ... Holland ... Finland ... Sweden? Imagine Scotland without this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to Loch Maree, from the Loch of the Yowes to the ‘thousand-waters’ of Benbecula: or Ireland, where the white clouds climbing out of the south may mirror themselves in still waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough of Shadows in the silent north.

The phrase is as liberal as ‘running water.’ That covers all inland waters in motion, from the greatest rivers to the brown burn of the hillside, from the melting of the snows in fierce spate to the swift invasion and troubled floods of the hurrying and confined tides. So ‘still waters’ covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, lagoons, the reaches of slow rivers, lochans, tarns, the dark brown pools in peat-moors, or the green-blue pools in open woods and shadowy forests, the duckweed-margined ponds at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds of old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep beneath green canopies or given over to the golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often, too, and in February and October above all, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the bewildered little lives of the pastures crowd the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes for days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals abide under the grey sky, sometimes a week or weeks pass before they recede. The crow flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the orange afterglow reflected in an inexplicable mirror where of late the grey-green grass and brown furrow stretched for leagues: the white owl, hawking the pastures after dusk, swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers upward from a ghostly flying image underneath, as a bat at sundown veers from the phantom of its purblind flight.

Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and moonlight are the three chief qualities of beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a matter of temperament, of the hour and occasion also no doubt, whether one prefer those where another dream-world, that of human life, companions them in the ineffable suspense of the ideal moment, the moment where the superfluous recedes and silence and stillness consummate the miraculous vision. Those moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate gold, where the pole-moored _sandolò_ thrusts a black wedge of shadow into the motionless drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly thrums a mandolin or hums drowsily a _canzonnetto d’amore_; those twilit canals where old palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty stilled and perfected in sleep; how unforgettable they are, how they thrill even in remembrance. In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible gardens. There are ancient towns like this in England also, as between Upsala and Elsinore to where old châteaux in Picardy guard the pollarded marais, or deserted Breton manoirs stand ghostly at the forest-end of untraversed meres.

These have their charm. But have they for us the intimate and unchanging spell of the lakes and meres and other still waters of our own land? Nothing, one might think, could be more beautiful than to see in the Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and the sloping gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in a new underwater wonderland: or to see Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in snow-held silence in the blue depths of Lac Léman: or to see Pilatus and a new city of Lucerne mysteriously changed and yet familiarly upbuilded among the moving green lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the Four Cantons. And yet leaning boulders of granite, yellow with lichen and grey with moss and deep-based among swards of heather and the green nomad bracken, will create a subtler magic in the brown depths of any Highland loch. There is a subtler spell in the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out of the fern and throws an intricate tracery of bough and branch into the unmoving wave, where the speckled trout and the speckled mavis meet as in the strange companionships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid the emerald glooms of pine and melancholy spruce, when a dream-world forest underneath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze cones, and enfolds the one white wandering cloud miraculously stayed at last between two columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured jade.

Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we have lost? ... because we newly find ourselves, as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul. It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory not our own but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dust move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealisably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly forward to inconceivable arrivals.

But whatever primitive wildness, whatever ancestral nearness we recover in communion with remote Nature, there is no question as to the fascination of beauty exercised by the still waters of which we speak, of their enduring spell. What lovelier thing in Nature than, on a serene and cloudless October day, to come upon a small lake surrounded by tall elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech and maple and sycamore cloudy with superb fusion of orange and scarlet and every shade of red and brown, by limes and aspens tremulous with shaken pale gold? Beautiful in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the woods become more beautiful in this silent marriage with placid waters, take on a beauty more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There is a haze which holds the fluent gold of the air. Silence is no longer quietude as in June; or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden noons of July or August; but a soundless suspense wherein the spirit of the world, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.

The same ineffable peace broods over all still waters: on the meres of Hereford, on the fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean sheets where the call of the sea-wind or the sea-wave is ever near.

Truly there must be a hidden magic in them, as old tales tell. I recall one where the poets and dreamers of the world are called ‘the children of pools.’ The poet and dreamer who so called them must have meant by his metaphor those who look into the hearts of men and into the dim eyes of Life, troubled by the beauty and mystery of the world, insatiable in longing for the ineffable and the unattainable. So, long ago, even ‘ornamental waters’ may have been symbols of the soul’s hunger and thirst, emblems of the perpetual silence and mystery of his fugitive destiny!

Somewhere, I think it is in the _Kalevala_, occurs the beautiful metaphor of still waters, ‘the mirrors of the world.’ Whoever the ancient singer was who made the phrase, he had in his heart love for still waters as well as the poet’s mind. The secret of their beauty is in that image. It may be a secret within a secret, for the mirror may disclose a world invisible to us, may reflect what our own or an ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal what the soul perceives and translates from its secret silences into symbol and the mysterious speech of the imagination.

_Still waters_; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ... amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase; or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music ... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. _Foam_--and the hour is gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn”: _Wind_--and the noises of the town are like the humming of wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and incommunicable things: _Ruth_--and sorrow and exile are become loveliness: _Helen_--and that immemorial desire is become _our_ desire, and that phantom beauty is become _our_ dream and _our_ passion. _Still Waters_--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of travelling wings.

THE PLEIAD-MONTH

From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.

What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance, centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies. On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia, on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings: and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by their seaward rising and setting. The _Matarii i nia_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the _Matarii i raro_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the several Persian words, from the ancient _Perv_ or the _Parur_ of Hafiz or the _Parwin_ of Omar Khayyam--derive from _Peru_, a word signifying ‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or to their _lucida_ not only the first great temple of Athenê on the Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere ‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great Spirit--_Groaperikie_, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more hangs visible in the northern sky.

It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of the nomenclature, of the literature, of scientific knowledge and speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter in a book might be given to Alcyone alone--that bright particular star of which it has been calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would sink to a star below the tenth magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after the astronomer’s calm march with dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the Pleiadic group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen therein only a small cluster of tiny stars, the ‘seven’ of Biblical and poetic and legendary lore, from ‘the Seven Archangels’ to the popular ‘Hen and her six chicks.’ Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate heavens, is eighty-three times more refulgent than that magnificent star Sirius, which has been called the ‘Glory of the South’: a thousand times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and Taygeta, Celeno and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has been calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and Electra about four hundred and eighty times larger. When one thinks of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the winged imagination can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail: at most one can but recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, ‘_Seek Him that maketh Pleiades and Orion_,’ or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, ‘_O day star, son of the morning_.’

A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment rivers and feed the well-springs, and that Maia’s breath falls in dew. The detail is fanciful; the central thought is in accord with legend and old wisdom. I do not know how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water, particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has been traced. It runs through many ancient records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks of ‘retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades,’ and mention has already been made of the Hindû association of them with ‘Flame.’ But Hesiod’s allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in a warm country where the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with days of sweltering closeness and heat. Moreover, Hesiod himself uses equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him, speaking of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with Pindar, Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest mention of them in ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds; and again as ‘the Seven Virgins’ and ‘the Virgin stars’--thus at one with his contemporary, the Hebrew Herdsman-prophet Amos, who called them by a word rendered in the Authorised Version of the Bible as ‘the seven stars.’ As for the Hindû symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred and primitive element, and that every begetter of life in any form would naturally be thus associate. The Hindûs called the Pleiad-Month (October-November) _Kartik_, and the reason of the great star-festival _Dībalī_, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy, after the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of dry warmth and beauty. The ‘sweet influences’ of the Pleiades thus indicated will come more familiarly to many readers in Milton’s

“the grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc’d,
Shedding sweet influence,...”

This ancient custom, the ‘Feast of Lamps,’ of the Western Hindûs survives to-day in the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ in Japan, though few Europeans seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.

In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent, both in ancient and modern tradition, with springs and rains and floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the comment in the old _Breeches_ Bible, opposite the mention of ‘the mystic seven’ in that supreme line in Job: ‘which starres arise when the sunne is in Taurus, which is the spring time, and bring flowres.’ A Latin poet, indeed, used _Pliada_ as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them as the _Vergiliae_, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately connected too with traditions of the Deluge: and in this association, perhaps also with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive to note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in that remote, mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient tradition of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time of their midnight culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked the middle of the night by the setting of those wild-doves of the sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them _Aetos_, our ‘Altair,’ the nocturnal timekeepers.

But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive the word ‘Pleiades’ or ‘Pliades,’ and in the singular ‘Plias,’ from the Greek word _plein_, ‘to sail,’ because (to quote an eminent living authority) ‘the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening of navigation to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did the close’--and though others consider that the derivation is from _pleios_, the epic form of the Greek word for ‘full,’ or, in the plural, ‘many’--and so to the equivalent ‘a cluster,’ corresponding to the Biblical _Kimāh_ and the Arabic _Al Thuruyya_, the Cluster, the Many Little Ones--it is perhaps more likely that a less learned and ordinary classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering the most probable derivation to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek mythology--‘Pleione, the mother of the seven sisters,’ as she was called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek poets alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus.[1] To this day, indeed, a common English designation for the group is ‘the Seven Sisters’: and lovers of English poetry will hardly need to be reminded of kindred allusions, from Chaucer’s ‘Atlantes doughtres sevene’ to Milton’s ‘the seven Atlantic sisters’ (reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil’s ‘Eoae Atlantides’) or to Keats’ ‘The Starry Seven, old Atlas’ children.’ The mediæval Italians had ‘the seven doves’ again (_sette palommiele_), and to-day their compatriots speak of the ‘seven dovelets.’ It would be tiresome to go through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races, and a few instances will equally indicate the prevalence, since the Anglo-Saxon _sifunsterri_. Miles Coverdale, in the first complete English Bible, comments on the passage in Job, ‘these vii. starres, the clocke henne with her chickens’; and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other English counties ‘the Hen and her Chickens’ is a popular term, as it is, in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the number seven, throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of this association with seven may be traced from the ancient Celtic ‘The Seven Hounds’ to the still more ancient ‘seven beneficent sky-spirits of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta’ or to the again more ancient ‘Seven Sisters of Industry’ of remote Chinese folklore. This feminine allusion in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred thought of the Roman writer Manilius--‘The narrow Cloudy Train of female stars’ ... _i.e._, no doubt, Pleione and her daughters.

[1] On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by Mr. D’Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) to οἰνάς, a dove, so called from its purple-red breast like wine, οἶνος, and naturally referred to a bunch of grapes; or perhaps because the bird appeared in migration at the time of the Vintage. [And see his further evidence of Cilician coins.]

Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore. What range, indeed, to cover ... since we should have to go back to two thousand years B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the poets of all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the _Mu’allakāt_, as translated by Sir William Jones: ‘It was the hour when the Pleiades appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems’: or that line in Graf’s translation of Sadi’s _Gulistân_ ... ‘as though the tops of the trees were encircled by the necklace of the Pleiades’: or, or our own day, of a verse such as Roscoe Thayer’s:

“slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,”

or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful couplet in _Locksley Hall_:

“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”

As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they enshrine. ‘Seamen’s starres’ our own King Jamie called them, after the popular use. The Finns call them ‘the Sieve,’ and the Provençals ‘the mosquito net,’ and the Italians ‘the Battledore.’ With the nomad Arabs they are ‘the Herd of Camels.’ Peoples so apart as the ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks of Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called them ‘the Dancers’: to the Solomon Islanders they are ‘a group of girls,’ and (strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the Australian aborigines thought of them as ‘Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing.’ There is perhaps no stranger name than our Gaelic _Crannarain_ (though _Grioglachan_ or _Meanmnach_ is more common), _i.e._, the baker’s peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker and his wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth.

But an end to this long excerpting from ‘starry notes’! In a later chapter, too, I propose to write of ‘Winter Stars,’ and the Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way--and I must take warning in time to condense better and write ‘more soothly’ as Chaucer has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation from Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s preface to his _Greek Birds_, to which I have alluded in a footnote. ‘As the White Doves came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile, so over the sea and the islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names. And our Aryan studies must not blind us to the presence in an Aryan tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or from the nameless and forgotten language that was spoken by the gods.’

Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month!

What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd looked up from the illimitable desert and called this dim cluster, this incalculable congregation of majesty and splendour, _Al Najm_, ‘the Constellation’ ... ‘_the_ Constellation’: since the first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit Sahara to bow before _Al Wasat_, the Central One: since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set, changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives ... for not long ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and named them newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace.

THE RAINY HYADES

“Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”

Years ago I remember coming upon this mysterious phrase in a poem or poetic drama by a French writer. The pagans, led by a priest, then went into the woods; and, in a hollow made of a hidden place swept by great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I forget whether the scourge of drought ended then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches, if rains poured through the leaves and mosses and reached the well-springs. I recall only the invocation, and some faint and broken memory of the twilight-procession of bitter hearts and wild voices, weary of vain lamentation and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or silent gods. But often I wondered as to Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous name. Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his name signals, a strayed Latin? And was he, as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a divinity of the clouds, clothed, like the shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as the more secretly to drive before him down the hidden ways of heaven the myriad hosts of the rain? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings of unfalling water, as a visionary once portrayed for me a likeness of Midir, that ancient Gaelic god at whose coming came and still come the sudden dews, or whose presence or the signs of whose passage would be revealed and still are revealed by the white glisten on thickets and grasses, by the moist coolness on the lips of leaf and flower.

The name, too, or one very like it, I heard once in a complicated (and, alas, for the most part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of Manan, the Poseidon of the Gael: remembered because of the singular companionship of three or four other Latin-sounding names, which the old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented or himself introduced, or mayhap had in the sequence of tradition from some forgotten monkish reciter of old. Aquarius and either Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly given as the Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomical company, I remember--and Neptheen or Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his oneness with Manan’s self.

But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as though washed away by one of his waves of rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, till the other day. Then, as it happened, I came upon the name once more, in a Latin quotation in an old book. So, he was of the proud Roman clan after all! and, by the context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal rains, and of those also that at the vernal equinox are as a sound of innumerable little clapping hands.

Could he be an astronomical figure, a Zodiacal prince of dominion, I wondered. In vain I searched through all available pages connected with the Hyades, the Stars of Water: in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius, of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and Pisces and Argo, that proud Ship of March. But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing the first sleet of winter whistle through the dishevelled oaks and soughing firs, when I was idly reading and recalling broken clues in connection with the astrological ‘House of Seturn,’ suddenly, in pursuit of a cross-reference to some detail in connection with the constellation of Capricorn, I encountered Imbrifer once more. ‘Imbrifer, the Rain-Bringing One.’

So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word, is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be ryche and wel lufyd’!

Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many of these October and November days of floods and rains! _Imbrifer_ ... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July, Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November, if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’ or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!

Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.

“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun....”

as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:

“... Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The _Goat_ and _Sun_: and then a heaven-sent cold.”

Many of us will remember with a thrill Milton’s magnificent image

“... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,”

and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the _Paradiso_ (relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and February 14).

“_The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun._”

May and November are the two ‘fatal’ months with the Celtic peoples: the first because of the influence of the Queen of Faerie (she has many names), and the second because of Midir, who sleeps in November, or, as another legend has it, ‘goes away’ in that month. In that month too the Daughter of Midir has departed on her long quest of her brother Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a confused traditionary remembrance, or a mytho-poeic invention.... I have come upon it once only), to find him asleep under the shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to woo him with pale arctic fires, and auroras, and a faint music wrought out of the murmur of polar airs on a harp made of a seal’s breast-bone. It is but in another guise the old Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that the touch of Dalua, the Secret Fool or the Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death. Once more, it is in November that Lîr holds his great banquet, a banquet that lasts three months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under the waves. In one way or another all these dreams are associated with the sea, with water and the Winter Solstice. By different ways of thought, of tradition, and of dreaming phantasy, the minds of this race or that people, of these scattered tribes or those broken clans, have reached the same strange goals of the imagination. The spell of Capricorn may be of the Waters of all time, since the Horned Goat of our Celtic forbears, the ‘Buccan Horn’ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the Latin ‘Imbrifer’ or ‘Gelidus’ or ‘Sea-Goat’ (in several variants), the Greek ‘Athalpees’ or the commoner term signifying a Horned Goat, the ancient Egyptian Chnemu, God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient Aztec Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian Munaxa, both signifying Goat Fish--and so forth, East and West, in the dim past and the confused present,--are all directly or indirectly associated with the element of Water, with the Sea, or rains, storm and change and subtle regeneration. The Greek writers called the allied constellation of Aquarius Hydrochoüs, the Water-Pourer, in mythological connection (a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion and the great Flood, that many believe to have been an ancestral memory of the Deluge which submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave it the same name, ‘se waeter-gyt.’ There is a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that dim Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse or drowned Atlantis, to the effect (for I know it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city unloosened to the devouring waves by Dahut the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water shook a fiery rain upon land and sea and that the floods of heaven fell, from the wake of the Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of the unseen tree that bears the silver Apples (the Pleiades), and as far as the hidden Wellsprings (_the Constellation of Capricorn_) and The Mansion of the White King (the Constellation of Aquarius)--the White King being water personified.

Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian analogues for the last named, Aquarius, relate to water. One of the few old-world exceptions was that Roman Zodiac on which the constellation figured as a peacock, symbol of Hêrê (Juno), because that in her month Gamelion (part January, part February) the sun enters this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain Bringer. Another name was Cecrops, because the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by the dews and has its eggs hatched by the vernal rains. It would be wearisome to collate superfluous instances. Enough, now, that the Arab, the Persian, the Syrian and the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene and the Anglo-Saxon in the designation of the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent such as the Arabian _Al Dalw_, the Well-Bucket: that in China of old its sign was recognised as a symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the Chinese Deucalion: and that still among the astrologers of Central Asia and Japan it has for emblem the Rat, the far-Asiatic ideograph for water. Strange too that Star-Seers so remote as the Magi of the East and the Druids of the West should centrate their stellar science on this particular constellation. And, once more, not less strange that alike by the banks of the Euphrates where it was called the Star of Mighty Destiny, on the Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of the Gaul and the Gael where too it symbolised Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star of Fortune--the group alluded to by Dante in the _Purgatorio_:

“... geomancers their Fortuna Major
See in the Orient before the dawn ...”

Again, is it tradition or coincidence that the Platonists of old held ‘the stairs of Capricorn’ to be the stellar way by which the souls of men ascended to heaven, so that the constellation became known as the Gate of the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and mystics of the West share the same belief? Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic forbears--the Silver Road, as generally given though obviously very loosely ... and may not the name more likely, especially in connection with a basic legend of the constellation of Corona Borealis, be the ‘Mansion of Ariand’ (Ariadne)? ... though commonly applied to the Milky Way or less often to the Northern Crown, is sometimes in its modern equivalent used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to astrologers, this Constellation with that of Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a certain time ‘the House of Saturn’ is here to be discerned.

It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in a rare book of some 200 years ago, _Meteorologiae_, speaks of Aquarius by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius.

But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the _Seasons_ (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it--so that ‘benign’ and not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet.

All these ‘watery constellations’--Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces--are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky--the clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset of winter--the Lords of Rain--‘sad companions of the turning year’ as an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides, ‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the ‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in Tennyson’s

“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.”

Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously ‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six storm-stars are torches set apart.

Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and ‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the Children of Water.

To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words I read to-day in a translation of the _Bhagavad Gita_:--‘I am in the hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One is the Imperishable.’

The unconcerned One!

WINTER STARS