Some myths are true

SOCRATES: The speech I will deliver is by Stesichorus son of Euphemus of Himera, and it has to go something like this:

It's false to say that, rather than someone who loves you madly and is good to go, you should take a disinterested lover who is sane and rational. That would be well said if all madness were bad. But it is through madness that our greatest blessings come to us, by which of course I mean the madness that is the gift of the gods. [Firstly,] in public as in private matters, the ravings of the oracle at Delphi have done Greece a lot of good, and so have the holy women who prophesy at Dodona, but little to no good when these same women were in their right minds. And if we were to speak of the Sibyl, and all others whose divinely-inspired pronunciations have corrected so many people's courses toward the future, then our discourse would obviously run on long.

But it is worth giving evidence for the beliefs of the ancient name-givers, according to whom madness was no cause for rebuke or shame. Otherwise, they would not have called our noblest prognostic arts by a name that implicates them in mania. But in their conviction that divinely-awarded madness is a blessing, they designated these arts as manic; it's only now that the "mantic arts" are spoken of with an inserted letter t, which is an insipid vulgarism. [By contrast,] when they assigned a name to those forms of research into the future performed by the non-mad, through studious contemplation of birds and other omens, they called them oionoïstikē, since these techniques endow mortal oiēsis (opinion) with nous (intellect) and historia (fruits of inquiry). Nowadays, by way of affecting a more sententious tone, people lengthen the second o and pronounce it as oiōnoïstikē. The upshot of all that is this: To the same degree that mantic arts are more perfect and honorable than augury—in name as they are in deed—the superiority of divine madness to mortal reason is attested by the ancients.

It also happens, in the event of ailments and grievous harms stemming from accursed deeds of long ago [e.g.], that madness intervenes to communicate a divinely-inspired message to those in need, and through resort to prayer and ministration to the gods it ferrets out their means of deliverance, hitting thus upon purifications and sacred rituals and bringing wellness once and for all to the sufferer touched with madness. Madness finds release for people in the grip of present evils, provided that they rave in the right way.

Thirdly, there is possession by the Muses. This madness takes hold of pure and tender souls and stirs them to song and other verse forms in a Bacchic frenzy. Thus arranged by the Muses' madness, countless feats of the heroic past are made teachable to hearers of the latter day. Anyone who shows up at the gates of poetry without it, presuming to become a worthy poet through craft alone, is destined for oblivion when the poetry of the stark and raving blows away that of the merely sane.

Plato, Phaedrus 244a-245a

Nights come in threes

I was informed by Tha‘lab on the authority of Salama that al-Farrā’ said:

The first three nights [of the lunar month] are called al-Ghurar or al-Ghurr "The Blazes." The moon rises in the forepart (ghurra) of the night, and is likened to the blaze (ghurra) on a horse's forehead because it is brighter in one area than the rest. By some these nights are called al-‘Urj "The Limpers." The first of them is called al-Naḥīra "The Affrontant" [because it "faces" the last night of the month before it]. The last night of the month, when the crescent moon disappears from view, is another Naḥīra.

The next three nights are called al-Nufal "The Superogatory," because they give more light than the first three. A gift that is not incumbent on the giver is an act of tanfīl, and superogatory prayer is called nāfila, because it is not obligatory. By some, these nights are called al-Shuhb "The Greys," because the whiteness of the moon mixes with the black of night. Horses with grey coats are called the same.

[Three nights omitted here are called by some al-Zuhar "The Brights," or defensibly "The Cythereans" after the planet Venus which is al-Zuhara.] There follow three Buhar "The Outshiners," so called because their moon outshines the darkness of the night.

Night thirteen is the night of al-Siwā’ "The [Full Moon's] Equivalent," also called al-‘Afrā’ "The Dusty." Night fourteen is the night of al-Badr "The Full Moon," so called for its uncanny resemblance (mubādara) to the sun. These are al-Bīḍ "The White Nights."

Then come three Dura‘ [an epithet of sheep that are] "Black with a White Head" or "White With a Black Head," because the last of them gets dark. Then there are three Bīḍ. There follow three Ẓulam "The Darks," then three Ḥanādis "The Pitch Blacks," and then the three Da’ādi’  "Hasteners [of the Occultation of the Moon]," singular Daydā’a or Da’dā’a. On al-Muḥāq "The Total Wipeout," the moon's occultation is total, and that is the last night of the month.

From The Book of Day and Night in [the Arabic] Language
by Ghulām Tha‘lab (Ibid.) (cf.)