Graham F wrote:Petosiris wrote

April 23 is the feast of saint George and that October 26 is the feast of saint Demetrius and these coincide with Taurus and Scorpio Julian Calendar tropical ingresses in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The superstitious people of Greece and the Balkans believed that the two saints pull the Sun around the sky and they specifically say that George controls the summer and that Demetrius controls the winter.

This is interesting, though curious they start pulling a month after the equinoxes, rather than straight away!
Reminds me that I found out a while ago that contrary to my belief, traditionally built churches are not aligned due east, but to various points on the local eastern horizon within the range of the Sun's rising in the course of the year. And in principle, this direction should correspond to the date of the Saint's day of that church. So a church of St John the Baptist should be aligned to the summer solstice (or nearly - 24th June, to be precise, in present calender), that of John the Evangelist to the winter solstice (Decmeber 27th, in fact).
So in a sense the St Johns "rule" those bits of the Sun's path as seen on the horizon, as I suggest for planetary rulers.
Graham

Right, the conception and nativity of John the Baptist and Jesus coincide with the tropical equinoxes and solstices in the Julian calendar, however the people for some reason thought that those two feasts better indicate the change of weather, and I think it has to with the weather becoming more ''solid'', which is not contrary, but using tropical logic.

I was rereading James Holden's translation of Rhetorius and in the appendix, which is sometimes attributed to Teucer of Babylon and there is a clear understanding of quadruplicity as related to the constellational imagery, where it is said that Libra has the power of a bicorporeal (double-bodied - mutable today) sign ''because of the balance-pans of the scales''. I imagine Capricorn should also be thought to have double-bodied qualities to some degree. I was noting that it is impossible for sidereal Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces to be anything other than double-bodied sign as it related to two, while there is nothing such about a month itself. This is why I think the quadruplicities were conceptualized sidereally and tropically (as we have Manilius and Ptolemy using month analogy, although the first uses it with the middle of the signs, Ptolemy also has four groupings, not quadruplicties). So the tropicalists argument that quadruplicities are clearly tropical, is not correct if you examine the properties in the Hellenistic and Indian tradition.