4. To count on your fingers is to use them as a map of the objects you wish to count. The digits (digit means finger) are like symbols for how many fingers you have used up: 1, 2, 3, ... You open up your left hand (if you are non-Polynesian - a Polynesian will instead close his fist) and start from thumb as number 1. When all 5 of your fingers are used up you move on to the right hand and there you begin with the little finger as number 6 - the right hand is like a mirror image of the left. Is it not quite astonishing to find that when you reach the thumb of your right hand there is no digit for it? We have only 9 counting digits but 10 fingers This phenomenon, I believe, has made the 10th month from winter solstice (in the rongorongo texts) into a vacuum, so to say. The reason for the missing 10th digit should be that it was time which was counted, not objects. On our oldfashioned analog watches the faces have no zero. Instead we find 12 where 0 should have been. Time measures duration and only after 1 hour can we say that 1 has been measured out, only after 1 hour can we begin to count. Superstition may have put 12 where 0 should have been. Still some of us shudder when we in the dark night hear the church bell strike 12. Time has moved beyond the old day and a new day is still absent. It is like in the ancient Egyptian 5 dark intercalendary nights between 365 and 360. 12 * 12 = 144 cannot be, because 11 is 'one more' (than 10) and then there is nothing further to say. We have counted 1, 2, 3, ... 8, 9, 0 and then begun on a new cycle with another 1. Ten months means zero, and then must come a tamaiti. The gods do not have 10 fingers, they have 8. They count 4 on the left hand and 4 on the right. 4 * 29.5 = 118 and twice that makes us arrive at Te Pei (possibly Gagana). In Ga8-24, number 8 from Ga8-16 as zero, we can see the empty hands with 4 + 4 = 8 fingers:
228 (at Ga8-24) can be read as 22 * 8 = 176, the last day before a zero day arrives (at Ga8-25 where 8 * 25 = 200 can be interpreted as a sign of a zero day). 177 = 6 * 29.5. Ga8-26 will then be a tamaiti day ('one more'), illustrated as a kind of hua rising at right. Read like this we will understand that Hua Reva should not primarily be the soul of the dead one rising but rather be the new baby (hua) ascending towards the sky. The number of glyphs in G cannot be 472, because that day is a zero day. 8 * 59 = 472. For the gods a zero day should not be written as 0 but like a double zero, 8. Gods are not singular, they are dual, rising and declining. Our counting is based on 10 while their is based on twice 8 = 16. Assigning Ga8-25 a zero value, Gb1-1 will be number 2 (quite in order because the 2nd side of the tablet is beginning here). Gb1-6 will be number 7, and then Gb1-7 another zero-day. But possibly we should begin to count anew with side b. On the other hand, the ominous Gb1-13 has number 243 counted from Gb8-30. To be true to time Ga1-1 cannot be the beginning, day zero must come one day earlier. Puo is the heaped up earth which makes 'the potato' vanish from sight, but which also enables a new one (Ga1-1) to sprout. |
