Laboratory
- The anguane and their knowledge of the best time for farming
tasks
One
of the most noteworthy skills, that Ladinian legends credit the
anguane with, is their knowledge of the
best time to perform farming tasks. Until now, I has always considered
this feature as independent form the others and uneasy to explain.
It got to my mind, however, that a simple and straightforward
explanation does exist, that can be logically connected with the
other attributions of this character.
As
an instance, we can find in DeRossi
(in "Il maso “Vivan” a Mazzin";
see also “Un ricco raccolto” [a rich
harvest]) a vivana (=anguana)
who “was also able to tell for certain which was the
best time for seeding, harvesting, collecting and for all other
home activities”. The tyrolean Saligen had
the same capability. The general opinion is that this feature
must be connected with the fact of representing something of a
“fertility spirit”.
We
already investigated two passages by Wolff
(the Croda Rossa and Le
Nozze di Merisana [Merisana’s wedding]),
from which we can conclude that the anguane, during the Bronze
Age, represented a sort of priestesses of the cult of the Sun
and water. In the Croda Rossa
we find an anguana who greets
sunrise every morning; in the Nozze
di Merisana we have an association among the Sun, a sacred
pond, the nymphs who inhabit it and a specific event (the “wedding”)
that happens at high noon. On this subject, we observed that this
pond is located due south of the sacred
mountain that Ey-de-Net climbs
before leaving for battle, and concluded that the “wedding”
might consist in the observation of the midday Sun’s passage
on the vertical of the sacred mountain, seen reflected on the
pond water mirror
On
the other hand, we can easily understand that, for a Bronze Age
farmer, the uncertainty about the best moment when to perform
agricultural tasks had to be caused not by the lack of “agro-historical”
data on the most appropriate season, but by the lack of any precise
calendar reference. Today people use to seed, to say, “on
St. John’s day”, but, if I have no calendar, how can
I know when St.John’s day is? I can only proceed by approximation.
The
simplest way to create a reasonably accurate solar calendar is
to observe the point of the horizon where the Sun rises. At our
latitudes, this point moves along an arc of about seventy degrees,
reaching 55° of azimuth on summer solstice (i.e. North-East,
10 degrees East) and 125° (South-East, 10 degrees East) on
winter solstice, at which time the cycle reverts and the sunrise
point “moves back”. The average shift is therefore
about 0.4° per day (maximum at equinoxes, minimum at solstices),
i.e. a little less than a whole solar diameter (0.5°). As
a consequence, an attentive and constant observer of the sunrise
against a horizon indented by mountains far away can easily answer
the non-trivial question “what day is today?” as a
function of the constantly shifting position of the Sun at its
morning rise.
The
anguane, just by the daily observation
of of the sunrise point, might therefore have created, over time,
a rudimentary agricultural calendar, by correlating the historically
most favourable season for the various tasks with the position
of the sunrise point in that period. Thence they might easily
determine that, as an instance, the best day for seeding was when
the Sun (as seen from their sanctuary)
rose “behind the third peak of mount So-and-So”, and
on that date they could convey to the farmers the information
that the time of seeding had come.
It
is possible that this simple (but vital!) calendarial function
contributed more than any other to cast on the anguane
an aura of mastering nature’s cycles and also, by extension,
of a patronage on the agricultural fertility and, by a further
easy extension, on fertility in general. The capability itself
of foretelling the future, that often is a feature of theirs,
might have taken its root from this “magic” knowledge.
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