Anglesey

[hvered]

Deja vu rather than full circle.

I've been to Anglesey once and vaguely remember a very dreary backwater but perhaps well suited for getting into and out of the UK?

[Boreades]

Yes, it is well suited for getting in & out of the UK, the local tidal patterns help shipping and sailors that are in the know.

The Romans did have a little bother with border controls, but they sorted that out, and there's been no bother ever since.

[hvered]

Anglesey is more or less diamond-shaped and its easternmost point is Penmon at the north-west limit of Conwy Bay. Directly opposite at the north-east limit of the bay is Great Orme.

Penmon is the site of an old church, ruined monastery and well dedicated to a sixth-century Welsh saint named Seiriol who decided to become a hermit on Ynys Lannog or Ynys Seiriol, renamed Puffin Island in the nineteenth century, and home to the largest cormorant colony in the British Isles.

It may have been a causewayed tidal island, hard to tell from the map.



The only thing of interest about St Seiriol is that he used to meet his friend St Cybi at a half-way point between Penmon and Holy or Holyhead Island, the westernmost point of the Anglesey 'diamond', where Cybi had founded a monastery. Cybi was at some stage a king of Cornwall, said to be the son of a warrior prince called Salomon which seems to have transmogrified into St Levan. St Levan is about eight miles south-west of Penzance, almost Land's End.

A Phoenician thread seems to connect these places, one famous for tin and the other for copper. There's a weird addendum to the Seiriol story: Seiriol was 'fair' apparently because when going to meet Cybi he'd have his back to the sun whereas Cybi was known as Cybi Felyn meaning Cybi the Tanned on account of facing the sun on his journeys. If Anglesey was a major rendez-vous for exchanges between traders of Cornish tin and Welsh copper, one metal being silvery and the other reddish-brown, which could be translated into meetings between a fair and a tanned 'saints'.

[Mick Harper]

Isn't it more likely that they were symbols for facing the sun and facing away from it, for navigational purposes, though I can't think what. Mrs Boreades will know.

[Boreades]

Mrs Boreades is preparing the allegorical material.

[hvered]

She might start with the Orme/dragon 'allegory', if Draconis is the pole star. Most if not all megalith-y legends seem to have some navigational reference, this is probably no exception.

[TisILeclerc]

Thuban, part of Draconis was the pole star for a very long time.

Due to the precession of Earth's rotational axis, Thuban was the naked-eye star closest to the north pole from 3942 BC, when it moved farther north than Theta Boötis, until 1793 BC, when it was superseded by Kappa Draconis. It was closest to the pole in 2830 BC, when it was less than ten arc-minutes away from the pole.[5] It remained within one degree of true north for nearly 200 years afterwards, and even 900 years after its closest approach, was just five degrees off the pole. Thuban was considered the pole star until about 1900 BC, when the much brighter Kochab began to approach the pole as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuban

In which case how long have the Drake families been prominent families?

[Boreades]

Excuse the delay, I'm just negotiating with Mrs Boreades re the allegorical material. She wants me to keep it under wraps.

[hvered]

Is Mrs B acquainted with Semitic languages? The allusion to a 'tanned' Welsh saint is somewhat puzzling unless it relates to tannim, loosely translated as 'teachings' but more generally means 'dragons'.

According to Wiki, tanna is the same root as shana which means 'year' in Hebrew

The root tanna (תנא) is the Talmudic Aramaic equivalent for the Hebrew root shanah (שנה), which also is the root-word of Mishnah. The verb shanah (שנה) literally means "to repeat [what one was taught]" and is used to mean "to learn".

and cites lots of stuff about sages and teachers which seems reasonable assuming that astronomers and mathematicians were the top scientists before computers.

In either case Thuban is Al-Tannin in Arabic and seems to be specifically the Dragon's head. (The Hydra which became a mythological sea-serpent takes into account the undulating course of the moon in relation to the Dragon's tail.) Cutting off a dragon's head may have been a nautical term or expression perhaps to do with safety, 'good over evil', that became part of Christian mythologising

Drake could be an amalgam of dragon-snake, the two seem to be almost interchangeable. A resume of star-related myths http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/G ... raco*.html gives various later Classical interpretations of the sky-dragon and refers to Minerva

mythologists said that it was the Snake snatched by Minerva from the giants and whirled to the sky, where it became Sidus Minervae et Bacchi or the monster killed by Cadmus at the fount of Mars, whose teeth he sowed for a crop of armed men.

which makes one wonder if Bath's association with the Roman Minerva wasn't unintentional.

[Mick Harper]

Since Cadmus introduced the alphabet, being killed by him might be referring to the switchover either from memory systems (Bards, Druids) to writing or from ideograms (British, cup and rings?) to alphabets (Phoenician) writing.