Aquila, Hawk of Dawn

"Standing in a misty, frosty field, the half-moon directly West, behind me, still shedding so much light that I have a defined shadow lying before me as I watch the hawk of dawn rise from the Eastern horizon. Except the hawk is an eagle or a vulture, and is also known as Llew Llaw Gyffes..."

Finally I am getting to writing this up, its been a month but it is still fresh in my mind.

After extinguishing the flame at sunset, I wanted to go out. It was dark, and cold because of the clear cloudless sky, I wanted to go out and see the moon. So I did.

I drove off into North Wales, wanting to be away from the light pollution in Chester, and I wanted to be somewhere open, where I could have a good view of the night sky. I ended up driving along lanes looking for a place to stop, passing signs for public footpaths, but they all seemed to be going alongside peoples gardens, and I didn't really want to be traipsing through gardens in the dark at midnight.

I kept on going until I came back to the main road, and there, on the junction was a verge I could park on, and a farm gate into an open field. Not exactly where I had planned, but it was where I had ended up, so I pulled in and climbed over the gate, making sure that the field was empty.

Now, at this point I hadn't actually thought about what I was going to do, I had been pre-occupied with finding somewhere to get out of the car. So, without thinking, I walked into the field, until I came to a halt, and with my arms open, turned round to survey the landscape and  the horizon. I hailed the moon, and called to the directions, inviting the landscape from every direction to hear me and accompany me. To the north the neolithic burial site that I have spent a year working with and have connection with. To the East the River I have had several years working and relationship with. South was all the places I have lived, in this area, West are the bronze age hill forts where I tend to do ritual and have relationship with. I called each one in to me, and I don't know why, but as I turned again, I spat onto the ground in the four directions, and then stopped to gaze at the moon.

And then, words came, from out of nowhere they just seemed to be flowing out of my mouth, proclaiming my love for this land, the magic of being in the here-and-now, my love for the spirits of this place, for the places in the directions that I had called to....

But I wasn't quite comfortable facing the moon, directly West. My attention was drawn too much to the field, so I turned and gazed into the field, the moon directly behind me, so I was facing East, just into an empty field, in the darkness. I watched my shadow for a while, black and defined on the ground, which had started to turn white with frost, and a mist had risen from the ground, making a circle around me.

My eyes were drawn to the stars above me, and over to the eastern horizon, nothing special there, a couple of stars and a line of trees - but between us was this mist... as I watched I felt certain that I could sense it moving, twisting and shaping into something - something... that I never was able to make out the form of...

And so I called to the spirit of place, this place, this field, could it show itself in a form that I could see and understand? The more I gazed into the swirling mists, the more they swirled and shifted, and the more I became convinced that *something* was going to take shape and step forward , but it didn't  And the more I stared and tried to visualise, the more distracted I got and ended up looking at the line of trees on the horizon.

I did note that the stars had risen from the east a little, and that there were two of them one directly above the other, in a vertical line. Nothing was happening with the mist, it was cold and I was getting too distracted anyway, the more I tried to concentrate on the mist, the more my eyes moved onto those two stars. Maybe it  was time to go home. I made a mental note to find out what the stars were called, see if they were part of something familiar, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned on Google sky map.

Thats when I really discovered that the directions were lined up exactly. These stars were part of a constellation rising exactly in the east, and they were called Aquila. I'd never heard of Aquila, so I googled it.

Aquila is a constellation in the northern sky. Its name is Latin for 'eagle' and it represents the bird who carried Zeus's/Jupiter's thunderbolts in Greco-Roman mythology.

Oh, ok, I like Jupiter, so it caught my interest and I read on. Also known to the Babylonians as The Eagle, and  the flying vulture to the Romans. Hindus know it as the half-eagle/half-human deity Garuda. So why was I so drawn to it? Oh..... I know an Eagle/vulture figure in welsh mythology... a dead and rotting eagle to be precise...

Is this the hawk of dawn? If not, what is the hawk of dawn? This became important to me - this constellation actually is a representation of and eagle/vulture/hawk, and it rises exactly in the east, in this land.

So I'm checking timings...
On December 21st it rises 08:30 GMT    <== sun rises at 08:03 GMT
On January 21st it rises 06:30 GMT
On February 21st it rises 04:30 GMT
On March 21st it rises 02.30 GMT
On April 21st it rises at 01:40 GMT+1
On May 21st it rises at 23:30 GMT+1
On June 21st it rises at 21:30 GMT+1   <== sun sets at 21:20 GMT+1
On July 21st it rises at 19:30 GMT+1
On August 21st it rises at 17.30 GMT+1
On September 21st it rises at 15:30 GMT+1
On October 21st it rises at 13.30 GMT+1
On November 21st it rises 10.30 GMT

All figures taken from Google sky map, and are for 2013, they are approximately when the entire constellation clears the horizon.

Looking at this right now, what strikes me is that the constellation is visible for the waxing half of the year, and invisible for the waning half of the year. It actually becomes the 'hawk of dawn' around the winter solstice, at the start of the solar year.

Llew Llaw Gyffes is taken to be a solar deity in the mabinogion, when he is ritually killed he becomes through death, an eagle - a dead, rotting eagle to be precise and is eventually found and brought back to life. This matches the timings here - after the summer solstice, as the sun is dying, the rising of the constellation of Aquila as it rises, is invisible in the daytime sky -dead or vanished into the underworld. So, in the case of Aquila it is when the sun is at his maximum strength , when he 'has it all' that Aquila dies (although what we think of as summer is really only just starting, temperature wise) and this ties in with Llew Llaw Gyffes, it is when he has his name, arms and a wife and castle/land that he dies and vanishes into the land of the dead.

His life, in this world is when he is a young boy, growing and acquiring his name, arms and bride - which is when Aquila is visible rising in the night sky between the winter and summer solstices.

Probably putting it better, in the mabinogion, Llew is the solar deity, and Blodeuwedd is the land, she is literally made out of the land itself. So, particularly in his early life, when Aquila can be seen rising from the horizon, having contact with the land, this is Llew in his physical manifestation in a physical body, in this world. When he reaches his peak of power, Llew and Blodeuwedd lose interest in each other, and she arranges for him to be ritually killed and sent into the other world. After the summer solstice, when the sun is at its peak, the length of daylight and the earlier rising time of Aquila mean that Aquila can only be seen well after it has risen, it exists quite separately from the land in the black sky. The connection between Aquila and the land are no longer visible. So Aquila exists only in the other world, not in the material world.




So now I have questions - Is the story of  Llew an explanation for Aquila? Is Aquila Llew? Pre-Bronze Age, when the skies here were clearer of clouds, before the sun and day length became more important, the stars were the main focus... was the observance of  Aquila actually the marker for the solstices? - Each month shows a time difference of 2 hours, so that is half an hour a week. If the 2 stars that I noticed were observed from the same location at regular intervals, say, an observatory of some kind, if 2 stones were aligned to the point on the horizon where they should rise - because this stays constant - very close to the solstices, the stars would either vanish from sight or come back into sight rising from the earth. A week is 30 minutes difference, so I am surmising that this could be accurate to within a day or so of the date taken to be the solstice.

And guess what - the ritual killing of Llew, there was only one way that he could die. At the summer solstice, when Aquila dies/becomes invisible, do you know what constellations are beneath him? And I mean, literally beneath him in our sky, so when his rising vanishes,as the evenings draw out, he will be visible later at night, when he is already high in the sky, there will be 2 constellations underneath him, under his feet... capricorn and aquarius. A goat and a water carrier. They are positioned rather similar to the 3 dots on the awen symbol, with Aquila as the top, and Aquarius and Capricorn side by side underneath, like feet.

More of the killing - this was to be on a river bank... could the river here be the milky way?Aquila lies in the milky way, and maybe this ties in with recent findings at stonehenge and a possible alignment with the milky way? http://digitaldigging.net/features/stonehenge-avenue/stonehenge-durrington-walls-avenue-alignment.html

Now we have a question about using eagles, capricorn and aquarius, surely they are just our accepted representations from the greek/roman astrologers. Yes. I agree. BUT if this is pre/bronze age and never written down... this astrology encoded as a story that explains how to calculate the solstices... by the time of the iron age druids, maybe it still had its scientific meaning understood as well as the story, maybe it was told using the british equivalents of aquarius and capricorn. But think on... when was it actually written down, and who wrote it down. And what astrological nomenclature did they use?

*I havent finished with this yet!* please, if you have read this, dont publicise it just yet until I've finished wrestling with it in my head. If you've read it, you probably know me, by all means talk to me about it. Its not top-secret,  but its not ready for public consumption just yet.