In Hamlet's Mill there are several interesting pictures with cosmic significance. Like numbers pictures are inherently ambivalent and they can therefore be used to 'map' each other much more easily than normal text. The following is an example:
I will use this picture to clarify - or at least to suggest - the difference in meaning conveyed by henua signs on one hand and 'strings' on the other. We need to differentiate between 'bands' forming ovals on one hand and circumferences defined by 'strings' on the other:
The collapsing 'hourglass' (Meru) is the main element in the circle formed by double 'bands' at bottom right in the picture above, but inside this circle are lots of clues of use for us when reading the pictures in the rongorongo texts. Before we will focus on these clues, however, let us take notice of the jar at top right, from which someone is rising fresh as new after having taken a bath in the container (which presumably contains a fluid of some sort). Immediately to the right is another jar, with 6 bands (one of them with 6 dots). I guess this jar illustrates the other opening, the one in the west where the newborn god in the left jar later will go down head first. And then there is at left of the newborn god a goddess holding a 'square' blanket in front of her, hiding the process of regeneration from our eagre / eager eyes. Time runs from left to right in the picture. |
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