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ADDENDA
10. Inspiration suddenly offered me a possible solution to the enigmatic manu mata e toru ('beast' with 3 'eyes'):
The new idea was generated from thinking about my presentation table for Level 6 and my suggestion there that there was a Matariki year in H/P/Q connected with my glyph type named maitaki:
Matariki refers to the Pleiades and maitaki seems to imply 'very good' (→ the Doublegood Pair = Gemini). ... In Hindu legend there was a mother goddess called Aditi, who had seven offspring. She is called 'Mother of the Gods'. Aditi, whose name means 'free, unbounded, infinity' was assigned in the ancient lists of constellations as the regent of the asterism Punarvasu. Punarvasu is dual in form and means 'The Doublegood Pair'. The singular form of this noun is used to refer to the star Pollux. It is not difficult to surmise that the other member of the Doublegood Pair was Castor ... In this type of glyph the normal case exhibits 3 (toru) 'eyes' (mata) both to the left and to the right. And the Hindu stated the Pleiades had 6 stars (not 7). Supposing each one of these half-seen 'eyes' basically were intended to depict a day - and not a month as I previously have contemplated. This would then be a more reasonable explanation for the case of the time when the pharaoh could not be seen:
... The king, wearing now a short, stiff archaic mantle, walks in a grave and stately manner to the sanctuary of the wolf-god Upwaut, the 'Opener of the Way', where he anoints the sacred standard and, preceded by this, marches to the palace chapel, into which he disappears. A period of time elapses during which the pharaoh is no longer manifest ... The number of stars in the Pleiades was normally perceived as 7 - although one of them was unfortunate in having married a mortal: ... To a casual glance, the Pleiades cluster appears as a fuzzy patch like a swarm of flies over the back of the bull ... According to mythology, Alcyone and Celaeno were both seduced by Poseidon. Maia, the eldest and most beautiful of the sisters, was seduced by Zeus and gave birth to Hermes; she later became foster-mother to Arcas, son of Zeus and Callisto. Zeus also seduced two others of the Pleiades: Electra, who gave birth to Dardanus, the founder of Troy; and Taygete, who gave birth to Lacedaemon, founder of Sparta. Asterope was ravished by Ares and became mother of Oenomaus, king of Pisa, near Olympia, who features in the legend of Auriga. Hence six Pleiades became paramours of the gods. Only Merope married a mortal, Sisyphus, a notorious trickster who was subsequently condemned to roll a stone eternally up a hill ... The odd (unlucky) number 7 could have been avoided by forcefully stating that there were only 6 stars in the Pleiades: ... The Mahabharata insists on six as the number of the Pleiades as well as of the mothers of Skanda and gives a very broad and wild description of the birth and the installation of Kartikeya 'by the assembled gods ... as their generalissimo', which is shattering, somehow, driving home how little one understands as yet. The least which can be said, assuredly: Mars was 'installed' during a more or less close conjunction of all planets; in Mbh. 9.45 (p. 133) it is stressed that the powerful gods assembled 'all poured water upon Skanda, even as the gods had poured water on the head of Varuna, the lord of waters, for investing him with dominion'. And this 'investiture' took place at the beginning of the Krita Yuga, the Golden Age ... A separation of 7 into a pair of integer halves was not possible. And in the first night of the Moon she could not be seen, because the light from Tane was at her back side in order to rejuvenate her. ...when the new moon appeared women assembled and bewailed those who had died since the last one, uttering the following lament: 'Alas! O moon! Thou has returned to life, but our departed beloved ones have not. Thou has bathed in the waiora a Tane, and had thy life renewed, but there is no fount to restore life to our departed ones. Alas' ... This idea could have been transferred to the cycle of the Sun. And the Sirius year was begining 6 (not 7) days after Canopus. 175 + 6 = 181. When the face of the new moon was sooty black it could have suggested that also day 181 - 3 = 178 might be in shadow, because 2 * 178 = 356 = the day after day 355 (December 21, the day of solstice). 177 = 6 * 29½. ... it seems fitting to begin a discussion of the Sun by first considering the period during which it is not visible. It is at this time, paradoxically, that the Sun is most obvious, for its absence has the understandable effect of stimulating an increasingly grateful awareness about its existence, together with a growing impatience for its return ... ... The Sun and the Moon were siblings - a brother and a sister - without parents. Siqiniq (the Sun) was staying all alone in an igloo. The camp would hold festivities in the qaggiq. One day, as usual, they started to hold a qaggiq early in evening when it was dark. Someone rushed into Siqiniq's igloo and blew out her qulliq at the same time. She was then pinned down and molested. This happened a number of times and Siqiniq was unable to find out who her attacker was. Her cooking pot always hung over her qulliq. When her attacker came again, she reached out and tried to touch the pot but her lamp was out and it was completely dark. Finally she managed to touch the pot. She then wiped her sooty hands on the face of her aggressor. After she had been molested once again the aggressor left her igloo. She followed him to see where he would go, hoping to finally find out who he was. She saw him going to the qaggiq where the festivities were being held. As she neared it she could hear people laughing. Someone was saying: 'Taqqiq inutuarsiurasumut aasit naatavinaaluk'. - Taqqiq (the Moon) has been marked with soot as he has again been looking for someone who might have been alone. So Siqiniq entered the qaggiq and saw that her brother's face was covered with soot. Embarrased and angry, she took her breast, cut it off and offered it to her brother saying that, as he liked all of her so much, why not eat her breast as well. Her brother refused the breast, but she continued to offer it. Then they both lit torches and ran out of the qaggiq. Siqiniq followed, breast in hand, still offering it to her brother. As she chased her brother around the qaggiq, Taqqiq fell down, extinguishing the flame on his torch, leaving only smouldering embers. Siqiniq's torch continued to burn brightly. Soon they both went up to the sky where the sister became Siqiniq, the Sun, while her brother became Taqqiq, the Moon ... Therefore manu mata etoru could have been a way to illustrate how the head of this not yet awake 'bird' corresponded to such a dark day. Although the 3 eyes back to back in the maitaki type of glyph might possibly have been perceived as beginning with 3 black days (when only cold food was served), because they were reversed as in the illustration above with pharaoh in the middle: ... In China, every year about the beginning of April, certain officials called Sz'hüen used of old to go about the country armed with wooden clappers. Their business was to summon the people and command them to put out every fire. This was the beginning of the season called Han-shih-tsieh, or 'eating of cold food'. For three days all household fires remained extinct as a preparation for the solemn renewal of the fire, which took place on the fifth or sixth day after the winter solstice ... Usually the Sun year should be measured as 360 + 5 = 365 days, but a leap year should be counted as 360 + 6 days. ... Nut, whom the Greeks sometimes identified with Rhea, was goddess of the sky, but it was debatable if in historical times she was the object of a genuine cult. She was Geb's twin sister and, it was said, married him secretly and against the will of Ra. Angered, Ra had the couple brutally separated by Shu and afterwards decreed that Nut could not bear a child in any given month of any year. Thoth, Plutarch tells us, happily had pity on her. Playing draughts with the Moon, he won in the course of several games a seventy-second part of the Moon's light with which he composed five new days. As these five intercalated days did not belong to the official Egyptian calendar of three hundred and sixty days, Nut was thus able to give birth successively to five children: Osiris, Haroeris (Horus), Set, Isis and Nepthys ...: Furthermore, the Sirius year according to the Julian and Gregorian calendars was a modern type of Sun oriented year and not a year measuring 364 days. ... 'a day and a year' can be equated with the Thirteen Prison Locks that guarded Elphin, if each lock was a 28-day month and he was released on the extra day of the 365. The ancient common-law month in Britain, according to Blackstone's Commantaries (2, IX, 142) is 28 days long, unless otherwise stated, and a lunar month is still popularly so reckoned, although a true lunar month, or lunation, from new moon to new moon, is roughly 29½ days long, and though thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number ... ... Ancient calendar-makers seem to have interposed the day which had no month, and was therefore not counted as part of the year, between the first and last of their artificial 28-day months: so that the farmer's year lasted, from the calendar-maker's point of view, literally a year and a day ... Therefore there should no longer be any black day between Canopus and Sirius. Which was much to the good.
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