Celivagous

Meaning:

Cotgrave: Heaven-faire*; heaven-affecting; wending, or bending, towards heaven. 

The Inky Fool: heavenward-wandering. 

Usefulness: 1 (Either in the spiritual sense, as Rabelais, Cotgrave and Sir Thomas use it, or in the sense used in The Horologicon** of a skyward glance to assess the weather. It's not that useful in Melbourne, where the state of the sky has no correlation to the state of the weather five minutes later.)

Logofascination: 1 (One of the lovely -vagous family of wandering words, as previously mentioned in circumbilivagination.)

In the wild: No - apart from Rabelais and the OED, The Horologicon appears to be this word's first venture into the world.

Degrees: 1 (Possibly a Rabelaisian coinage - coelivages in French - which has been Anglicised by Sir Thomas.)

Connections: n/a

Which is used in: G&P, Book the Third, XXII: How Panurge patrocinates and defendeth the Order of the Begging Friars. To patrocinate is to defend; a poet has attacked some orders of the Church and Panurge suspects him of heresy:

he doth so villainously rail at the Mendicant Friars and Jacobins, who are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised.

Frame sums up the imagery here rather nicely - the groups are "counterweights in the dynamics of matters heavenly".  More to come on some of those other words, and if I get really motivated, the Catholic politics of the time.


* faire in the sense of journey.
**where it is unfortunately spelt with an extra l.