Caer Australis Blog

The astronomical rarity that occurred in 2002, the near conjunction of the visible planets, was recorded in the Harvard University Gazette in its April 18, 2002 issue. The image, copied from the page, shows the evening sky in April 2002. Later that year in June, the dawn rise of the constellation Taurus saw the planets rising with Aldebaran and the Pleiades star cluster, shown in the intro page for The Celtic Calendar 2007, beginning a new 30 year Celtic Age as recorded by Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. In ancient times, the dawn rise of the Pleiades occurred in May, from which the Beltaine festival arose following Romanisation. Actual photographs of Saturn in Taurus are shown in Saturn Return 2002 on the CA website.

September 1st is the official start to Spring in Australia, several weeks before the southern vernal equinox, and a month after ’southern Imbolg’, Teine Earrach Deas. The Celtic reckoning allows for the spectacular awakening of oaks, and here is the green mantle displayed by the Tranby oaks by the banks of the Swan.

     ”Oak that grows
     between two banks…
     Stately and majestic
     is its aspect!”
                     - Gwydion

And Arianrhod declared to Lleu, “You will never have a wife of the race that now inhabits the Earth!” So Math and his nephew Gwydion set about, by magical incantations, to form a wife for the Lleu the nephew of Gwydion. They took blossoms of oak, of broom and of meadow-sweet, produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man had ever seen. To her they gave the name, Blodeuwedd, and to Lleu she would become bride.

An updated presentation of the “Celtic Calendar” section has been uploaded. This new presentation is more fully referenced and contains new ancient historical source information that better explains the May commencement of the Celtic calendar.

We live on a bend of the Swan River where back in 1839 the settler Joseph Hardey built this home, Tranby House, and planted some oaks that had sprouted from acorns which he took with him from the north of Britian, having travelled via the Cape to the Swan River Colony on the ship Tranby; the suburb Maylands is named for his wife. The oaks are of course referred to as Tranby Oaks, from which many acorns have been planted all about Australia. In 1976, John planted one such oakling in Kiama Downs on the south coast of NSW. This photo was taken at the start of the southern spring, with the buds beginning to swell with the promise of a new year’s growth ahead.

One of the niggling questions that has always been at the back of my mind when writing entries onto the Caer Australis website was ‘Is this being presented in an appropriate way’. The reason for this is that having only ever written formal scientific papers, the very nature of historical essay writing and the way information is presented may vary considerably. And indeed that is the case; and moreover, writing for the web has its own set of necessities.

So a way to check this out was to have an historical essay peer reviewed. To this end, I enrolled in the very interesting subject offered by Macquarie University, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic’. From that, the use of (sometimes extensive) footnotes was encountered, assisting in he presentation of otherwise convoluted explanations. And also the Perseus ancient source database and the documents presented by Bill Thayer were found. There is absolutely nothing worse than not being able to access important information, and here these two databases have an amazing collection - that if you get frazzed can take days to escape :)!

Hi all,

As we said in our last post, we are developing a new area called “Conquest”. This can be found at: http://conquest.caeraustralis.com.au/ or by clicking Conquest on the menu at right.

The page gives an idea of the direction we’re going in this area. If anyone has any ideas or comments, please email the Webmaster.

We aim to have something more meaty up there soon!

Rhys & John
Caer Australis

Greetings to all at Imbolg and ’southern’ Lughnasa!

Over the next three months we’re going to be building a new section on
Caer Australis that will be a happy consequence of some university
units we’re sitting - an internet design subject and an ancient
history subject - and so in a similar way the Arthur Project
section, we hope you’ll enjoy ‘Conquest’, reviewing the period of
Roman expansion into the Celtic world. Hmmmm, ‘enjoy’ might not be
quite the right verb… It will cover the military and social
conquests of Gaul and Britain and the subsequent expansion of Roman
ideas into Ireland. Our contribution in ‘Conquest’ is to
try to provide inasmuch as it is reasonable a Celtic perspective to
these events. The change from a Celtic civilisation to a Roman one had
great economic benefits like lower interest rates and taxes (huh?) and
excellent market place opportunities to earn greater profits (gaa?),
but at the same time groups such as the Seine River Shipping
Association (the what now?) still felt it honourable to erect an altar
to Celtic gods while dedicating it to the Emporer. The complex and
difficult decisions of this time of change will be explored.

A few bibs and bobs about the site - on the links section are
reasonably expansive divisions to pagan and re-earthing sites in
Australia. This time of environmental concern certainly warrants the
thoughts and philosophies and world-views that can balance human ways of treating the world with the needs of health and wealth. How different things would be if our society held ‘unthinkable’ the abuse of Rivers or that we valued the ‘cost’ of clean air higher than the
convenience of driving down to the shops! Over the past year a project of the Perth Zoo has been to help the sunbears from abuse and decline through a breeding project. We’ve been making some contributions to the Project Sun Bear and have had a link to it from the Fire Feasts section on CA (which has pleasingly been made use of by visitors), and a breeding pair has now come to Perth and now live at a purpose made enclosure for them

CaerOz-l has been made unavailable to view by general visitors, this is only fair for the sake of open
discussion on that Group; naturally, anything that would be wanted to be viewed
for anyone can be placed on the Caer Australis Forum .

John & Rhys
Caer Australis

Warm wishes to all for the season!

Since Samhain there’s been a surge of Google searches for calendar
info for 2007, and that prompted us to get the Celtic Calendar 2007 up
for presentation. As you all know, CA acknowledges the Beltaine
beginning of the Celtic year as told in Fennian legend, and that the
Julian/Gregorian Irish month cet-Samhin is the cultural continuance of
Celtic Gaulish Samon. We also acknowledge Pliny’s information that
reveals that the months are marked from the First Quarter, Caesar’s
information that the days begin at sunset and Plutarch’s information
that the 30 year cycles begin when Saturn is aligned in Taurus. With
this wealth of information, we are pleased to present the 2007
calendar, beginning with the intercalary month of Ciallos on April
24th 2007. A point of interest is that this month’s name is found in
Irish, meaning ‘understanding’ or ‘the knowledge’, and its direct
Welsh equivalent is Pwyll, a name instantly recognised from the Mabinogi.

We’ve included a presentation within each of the months of 2007/8
called Celtic Dawn: 503BC. This is made courtesy of the CyberSky
virtual planetarium. In that year, corresponding to the beginning of
the great Celtic flourish that lasted until the Conquest (and indeed
beyond), Saturn aligned with Aldebaran, such that Beltaine of that
year began what may well have been the very first Celtic Calendar
year, developed over the 200 years of Hallstatt period. Why that year
stands out is because it does correspond to the start of the La Tene
culture, the classically Celtic culture, and that year also aligned on
the dawn horizon were all the other visible planets!

Reciporacal links with a wide range of sites in Australia and around
the globe has brought about a new Link area on CA, called Pagans in
Australia. From these links are found a breadth of thought and a
diversity of interest from the pagan community in Australia. If you
know of any sites that should be included, please point us to them!

Links to the new area are:

Celtic Calendar 2007:
http://caeraustralis.com.au/celticyear2007.htm
Southern Calendar 2007:
http://caeraustralis.com.au/southernyear2007.htm
Pagans in Australia:
http://caeraustralis.com.au/paganoz.htm

Of course, feedback & comments are always welcome.

Hwyl,

John & Rhys

A quick post to provide a link to CyberSky, a virtual planetarium:

The capacity to virtually experience the astronomical setting in ancient times is provided by computer simulations of planetariums. Using CyberSky, freeware found at:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/2127700/cyber-sky

you can view the sky from any location on Earth and set the date as required. To appreciate the Celtic calendar during its period of active use, it is possible with CyberSky to view, for example, the sunrise of November eve in 500BC, and there on the Eastern Horizon is clearly viewed Antares rising with the Sun; Aldebaran is setting - the two red stars that define the seasons of the Celtic year can be viewed virtually and a strong appreciation gained!