radiant hour

In actual fact, their name is not a plural form, or even Greek. It is a jumbled Sumerian title, *USh-GU-RI-UD, "erect phallus of the storm". The Greek rearrangement of the various verbal elements began with *ud-ush-gu-ri became *di_us_ku_roi, and thus to Dioskoroi or, as it is otherwise written in the texts, Dioskouroi. We know their name in the rather more accurately transmitted form of USh-GU-RI-UD, "Iscariot", the name of Jesus' betrayer in the New Testament story. Elsewhere, the writers and theologians read the name Dioscouroi in the manner of the classicists, by splitting a presumed singular into two, "son of God", as a title for their hero Jesus. Interestingly, the Sumerian original has come down into Persian as another name of the mushroom, saqrãtiyün.