So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word, is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be ryche and wel lufyd’!
Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many of these October and November days of floods and rains! Imbrifer ... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July, Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November, if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’ or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!
Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.
“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun....”
as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:
“... Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The Goat and Sun: and then a heaven-sent cold.”
Many of us will remember with a thrill Milton’s magnificent image
“... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,”
and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the Paradiso (relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and February 14).
“The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun.”