Trade Secrets

[Boreades]

I wonder if that's where we got Britannia from?

Sybil's thunderbolt becomes a trident, and the Caduceus is shown as a staff.

We just need a beautiful pea-green boat for the owl and the pussy cat.

[Boreades]

More crows?

Mick probably already knows this, but the first grade of initiation in Mithraic ritual is said to be Corax (raven) - The symbols in the Ostia mosaic = raven, beaker (the caduceus is a symbol of Mercury)

In the Santa Prisca Mithraeum in Rome, the grades are listed with an inscription next to each, commending the grade-holder to a planetary deity.

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/mithr ... ?page=main

[Boreades]

Is it too bleeding obvious to mention that Mercury is the winged messenger?

Gor blimey, stone the crows.

[hvered]

Bull-running wasn't only in Pamplona it seems. The town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, on the A1 or Great North Road, had an annual bull-running festival that lasted 650 years until 1837 when the nascent RSPCA banned it on grounds of cruelty (to the bulls, not the runners). Soldiers had to be sent due to the locals protesting at 'Londoners' interfering in rural affairs. It has recently been reinstated.

The bull run was held on St Brice's Day, 13th November. St Brice of Tours was a follower, and indeed immediate successor, of St Martin of Tours whose feast day, Martinmass, is 11th November, but Brice is far less known than Martin. St Martin appears to have been a popular figure among Roman soldiery, patron saint of such diverse groups as soldiers, vintners, tailors, not to mention a patron saint of France, and, above all, horses.

There is no obvious patron saint of bullfighting/bull-running, when I last checked Saint Fermin (Hermes), patron saint of Pamplona, was the name that came up, almost as obscure as Brice, though we found a St Fermin's Well on Ermine Street. Tours was also associated with long-distance droving/trade, being a stopping-off place on the Santiago de Compostela route.

[Boreades]

I'm at a loss to find a plausible link between bull-running in bullious flat Lincolnshire and the same on the plain in Spain.

Except that in many cattle-rearing communities, the cows are more valuable than the bulls. Apart from the lucky boy that gets to be kept as stud stock, the rest of the boys have a shorter life than the girls. Something has to be done with them.

[hvered]

Well, you seem to have found two links in one sentence, bulls and flatness. To some extent all cattle are 'run' or herded into market squares or plazas. The market is next to or near the main road, the entrance to the market square is straight and only wide enough for one animal at a time.

Bull-running isn't bull-fighting, the only animals that might be harmed are human. Bulls were prized for strength rather than ferocity so their chief uses were for ploughing. Presumably the rest were processed as manuscripts, jerkins and so on.

[Boreades]

Presumably the excess males (to be used for plowing) would be castrated to make them docile oxen.

[hvered]

Castrating (and harnessing/training) animals is done with withies and very much tied up with Hermes in his role as god of herds.

[Boreades]

Did anyone make any sense of the Britannia symbology?
Big lions of course, but owls killing frogs?

[hvered]

Crows, or, more specifically, cormorants, have come to my attention. It started with Toldhu, translated as 'black hollow', or Mullion Island, where cormorants are annually ringed. I wondered if the nearby Loe, a freshwater inland lake, separated by Loe Bar from the sea, was a cormorant fish-pond as it were.

Looking at Google Earth, Mullion Island is just offshore from Mullion Cove on the Lizard Peninsula, and on the Michael-Apollo Line or whatever it's called.



There is a clear view across Mount's Bay to St Michael's Mount. So tracking this putative line, it crosses the peninsula north-east to south-west, ending up at Church Cove where nowadays there is a lifeboat station (not an uncommon association I have found).

The route goes across Predannack Airfield, built in 1941, which suggests the terrain was relatively flat, and then, unexpectedly, past Mount Hermon. There are two St Rumon, also spelt Ruan, churches, now disused, one on the north side of Mount Hermon and the other to the south-west. Both have springs or wells attached. 'Nothing is known' about this St Rumon whose name sounds like a transliteration of Hermon.