Trade Secrets

[Boreades]

Ah zink zis iz what you are looking forr
http://members.tripod.com/hew_frank/id19.htm

Hugh Franklin's site is most excellent indeed.
But for poor megalithic muppets (like us) it doesn't have a clear explanation of how relative dimensions translate into an absolute linear measure.
For example,
http://members.tripod.com/hew_frank/id19.htm
Circumference / M = 4 SS = 2.720699046
But it doesn't clearly explain why that's one foot.

'Allo, mon ami. Good moaning. Tis I, Boreades, returned from journeys into the wilderness of sun-bleached beaches and bars of southern Europe. (Ah, it's a hard life, but somebody's got to do it. All in the cause of TME)

I have returned with an explanation of how the megalithic yard is derived directly from astronomical observations, which combines both distance and time. It needs some diagrams to make it simpler to understand, so please excuse the teaser, while I figure out how to draw the diagrams on computer.

[hvered]

The Lord Mayor's Show dates back we're told to 1189, i.e. since Time Immemorial in legal jargon (and the first year of Richard I's reign). It takes place now in early November but before the shift to the Gregorian calendar the parade/pageant was on October 28th, the feast day of St Jude and St Simon, a duo designated by the church as zealots and officially martyred on the same day. [Jude is, according to the theologians, definitely not to be confused with Judas Iscariot though he's an elusive figure, sometimes called 'Thaddeus', who may or may not have been related to James and/or Jesus and, rather strangely, the patron saint of desperate or lost causes.]

The mayoral mascots aren't the two saints but twin giants, Gog and Magog, traditionally made of wicker and plaster. No-one seems to know why giants were so honoured, possibly something to do with the Matter of Britain myth which states that the Roman emperor Diocletian had thirty-three wicked daughters who, led by Alba the eldest daughter, slew their unwanted husbands while they slept and were cast adrift in the manner of Celtic 'saints' until they landed in Britain/ Albion where they begat a race of giants. The most likely 'real' connection with Gog and Magog is the Gog Magog Hills on the north side of the Bronze Age site of Wandlebury Hill, on the Icknield Way where it crosses the Peddars Way (described as a 'Roman' road presumably due to its straightness).

The Mayor's show is supposed to have been established by King John but the legends, vague as they are, suggest older antecedents, as with Bonfire Night.

[Boreades]

I'm just recycling this:



To make it easier to compare to this:



Which, I'm told, shows "Around 2300 BC, Aryan tribes (Indo-Iranians) poured off the Pontic Steppes, and migrated east & south. By ~1800 BC, they had reached China & India. In the figure (above), these Indo-Iranians' original homelands are colored dark red, while their migrations are marked in light red. This expansion coincides with a catastrophic climate change, around 2200 BC**, which laid low Egypt's Old Kingdom***.
[Around here we refer to that as the Old Kingdom Catastrophe. In regards to this map it is important to note that THE TOCHARIANS BELONGED TO THE BLUE GROUP OF EUROPEANS (incl. Celtic) RATHER THAN TO THE RED ONES: They were Centum speakers and not Satem ones."

So, just to make it clear, the red-heads are in the blue corner, and the non-red-heads are in the red corner. Clear as mud?

Refs:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum-Satem_isogloss
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22nd_century_BC_drought
*** BBC Ancient Apocalypse -- Death on the Nile (DVD). See also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1458327.stm

That (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss) says:
An isogloss—also called a heterogloss (see Etymology below)—is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature.

What does that mean? Looks like a red-headed Celt, talks like a red-headed Celt, walks like a red-headed Celt?
Quack.

[hvered]

Sue Perkins, almost at the end of her journey along the Mekong, arrived at the Himalayas and stayed the night with a yak-herding family who've never met any Westerners.

When she asked what they'd expected their visitor to look like, they said 'someone tall with red hair and blue eyes'. Who were they thinking of?

[Boreades]

It seems to me that both maps are incomplete.

The Guardian/Eupedia one is missing the Tocharians, and the Centum-Satem isogloss one is missing the Northern Russian ones.

If we merge the two, do we have a more complete picture of where our red-heads came from?

[Boreades]

Pliny the Elder (, Chap XXIV "Taprobane") reports a description of the "Seres" (in the territories of northwestern China) made by an embassy from Taprobane (Ceylon) to Emperor Claudius, saying that they "exceeded the ordinary human height, had flaxen hair, and blue eyes, and made an uncouth sort of noise by way of talking", suggesting they may be referring to the ancient Caucasian populations of the Tarim Basin:

[Boreades]

The Lord Mayor's Show...mascots aren't the two saints but twin giants, Gog and Magog, traditionally made of wicker and plaster. No-one seems to know why giants were so honoured, possibly something to do with the Matter of Britain myth

Gog-Magog legends are found not just in several parts of Britain (Cambridge, Devon, Cornwall, and Glastonbury at least) but also in the Middle East. In Britain, the legends tend to be fairly benign. It’s said that there used to be a pair of Gog and Magog (or Gogmagot and Corineus) figures on Plymouth Hoe, connected with the story of Corineus and Brutus as the founder of Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Hoe
http://www.unitythroughdiversity.org/gog--magog.html

When the two opponents came to grips, Gogmagog hugged the duke to him in so tight an embrace that three of his ribs were broken. Corineus was so enraged that he at once rushed to the nearest stretch of shore and hurled Gogmagog off the cliff to his death on the rocks below. The place at which this happened was thereafter known as Gogmagog’s Leap (Albion: A Guide To Legendary Britain by Jennifer Westwood.)

There is a record of the chalk cut giant being on Plymouth Hoe in 1486 and a record in the City Archive shows a receipt for a bill for cleaning and weeding the giant. The bill was paid by the Earl of Edgcumbe.
http://plymouthlocalhistory.blogspot.co ... magog.html

In the Ogbourne valley in Wiltshire, near Avebury, a large Celtic temple has been found; the largest room in the temple was a six foot high malting oven, used to roast barley to make beer. Was this associated with Og?

Gogmagot and Corineus were traditionally carried in the Lord Mayor’s Parade in London. Or Gog and Magog as they are now known, as the traditional guardians of the City of London.

https://lordmayorsshow.london/history/gog-and-magog

Brutus, having thus at last set eyes upon his kingdom, formed a design of building a city, and, with this view, traveled through the land to find out a convenient situation, and coming to the river Thames, he walked along the shore, and at last pitched upon a place very fit for his purpose. Here, therefore, he built a city, which he called New Troy; under which name it continued a long time after, till at last, by the corruption of the original word, at came to be called Trinovantum. But afterwards when Lud, the brother of Cassibellaun, who made war against Julius Caesar, obtained the government of the kingdom, he surrounded it with stately walls, and towers of admirable workmanship, and ordered it to be called after his name, Kaer-Lud, that is, the City of Lud. But this very thing became afterward the occasion of a great quarrel between him and his brother Nennius, who took offence at his abolishing the name of Troy in this country.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_o ... /Book_1#16

Likewise, Thomas Lethbridge, (author of Gogmagog – The Buried Gods) claimed to have found a giant carved into the chalk at Wandlebury, but that seems to have upset a great many of the archeos of his time, who thought it was wishful thinking at best.

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba112/feat3.shtml

In the Middle East, Gog and Magog stories tend to be a lot more apocalyptic, based on Ezekial and Revalations, with stories of war and “end times” for Israel.
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gog_and_Magog

But trying to makes sense of all that disappears into an internet twilight zone of fundamental religious beliefs of all kinds (Christian, Jewish and Islamic) including how George W Bush tried to get France to join in the invasion of Iraq.

President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... eorge-bush
http://trackingbibleprophecy.com/gog_magog.php
http://www.imranhosein.org/books/131-an ... n-age.html

As remarked by Wael Baseem
https://wbaseem.wordpress.com/2013/10/2 ... t-to-know/
.. Any place north of the Holy Land may be the land of Gog and Magog; Gog may be a person and Magog a nation; the Magog of the Genesis reference is certainly a person (the descendent of Noah through Japeth) but the Magog of the other references is apparently a nation or tribe. Take your pick.
Gog/Magog features in the history of Alexander The Great as well, and could refer to whoever you want the AntiChrist to be at this moment in history.

[spiral]

The mayoral mascots aren't the two saints but twin giants, Gog and Magog, traditionally made of wicker and plaster.

Gaia and mother Gaia?

[Boreades]

Err, Gaia and her mother would be nice; but the legends, even though they are frustratingly opaque in parts, all seem to concur that these Gog Magog characters are militantly masculine.

[Boreades]

It's bothering me that my attempt to connect Brutus (et al) and GogMagog in Devon & Cornwall to GogMagog and the Corporation of London is incomplete, or just missing chunks.

They are sometimes dressed as Roman soldiers (why?) and in that guise represent Constantinus (Caesar after subduing Britain) and Constantine (Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor). But how does that help our understanding?

What's the matter with the "Matter of Britain" anyway? Is it because we're taking the Matter of Britain as more than a legendary record? Are we straying into Creation Myth territory?

Or is this THOBR territory?