3. The journey of Sun across the sky must anciently have been one of the fundamental patterns recognized. When Sun rose in the morning it was as if life was returning, and once on Easter Island he was greeted with fires at daybreak: "The first of all foreign visitors on Easter Island was the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen., who approached the island in the evening twilight of Easter Sunday, 1722. As the sun rose above the sea next morning the Dutchmen brought their ships close inshore and observed a mixed crowd of fair-skinned and dark-skinned people who had lit fires before some enormous statues standing in a row. The people ashore were squatting in front of the statues, with their heads bent while they alternatively raised and lowered their arms. When the sun rose they prostrated themselves on the ground facing the sunrise, their fires still flickering before the stone colossi. The statues were even then so old and eroded that Roggeveen could with his bare fingers break pieces away from the decomposed surface, wherefore he concluded that the giant figures were simply molded from clay and soil mixed with pebbles. The Dutchmen left the island after a single day's visit." (Thor Heyerdahl, Early Man and the Ocean.) Or were their fires lit in order to induce Sun to rise? Can you talk or think about cause and effect if in reality events go hand-in-hand? Sun was born at the horizon in the east and reached manhood at noon. In the evening his 'head' was taken care of ('bitten off and swallowed'). Sun was likened to a 'person' and his development stages could then be easily understood, maybe excepting his last phase when he had disappeared. |