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Having just discovered a cool website I want to pass its link along to you in an archetypal sort of way. It's called
Goddess Guide and has all flavors of goddess cultures and origins for your perusal.
Image shown: a drawing I rendered in 2004,
Ceres and Pallas, using my accustomed oil and watercolour pencils (Prismacolor and Rexel Derwent) on paper. Ceres is, as you know,
The Mother archetype, and Pallas is
The Daughter.
In ancient Egypt (or in modern Egypt fo all I know) the great Temple of Ceres on Aventine Hill was the location for the celebration each Feb 11 for the culmination of SIRIUS, the Dog Star, at the stroke of midnight.
In ancient Arabia, SIRIUS was the wife and sister of Canopus, an intriguing star in the constellation Argo, so right away we know it relates to Jason and the Argonauts' Quest for the Golden Fleece.
(These days, gold is involved in another kind of
fleecing - the rich fleecing and scamming the poor.)
Canopus, the Star of Egypt, is in Alpha Carina, and is the second brightest star in the sky. Its keywords are:
the navigator; pathfinder (as given in
Brady's Book of Fixed Stars.) Canopus is the brightest star in Argo and was known to the Egyptians long before the Greeks created the Argo myth.
Canopus is linked to wisdom, conservatism, and possibly to domestic problems; NASA uses it to navigate spacecraft. It was considered the South Pole star by many cultures and is implicated in end of the world themes because of its designation as 'the weight at the end of the world's plum line' which is used to define the poles. It is the Point of Stillness in the south.
And yet...perhaps you're finding more and more writings these days concerning the shifting of Earth's magnetic poles, a phenomenon said to have begun. If you aren't, what are you doing instead? Never mind, none of my business. Besides, if pole shifting is truly ongoing Now, there's nothing we can do about it, is there? (Except prayer, imho.)
Native American tribes also knew of Canopus and noticed that the star was moving toward the North Pole star (now Polaris), a time when they taught that the world will end when the South Pole star (the 'Death Star") catches up with Polaris and captures it.
(The parallel myth here is the story of Apollo and Phaethon. Canopus is where Cronos - Saturn - landed when he was cast from his chariot into the
River Eridanus during the battle between the
Olympians and the Titans.)
Thus
Heavy-Weighing Canopus is considered the Lord of the Underworld, the great receiver of all souls, so naturally we associate this with Pluto/Hades, the Ferryman of Souls across the
River Styx.
In its navigator role, Canopus represents an insatiable need to explore while we may for the time draweth nigh when all opportunity for such expansion expires for the human race and we may
Cross the Great Water and All will be ultimately revealed to be At One with the Universal Mind.
~:~
