1. To continue with the 'bilocations' of ancient cosmology: "Fanciful, assuredly, but neither the Milky Way nor the terrestrial Ganges offered any basis for the imagery of a river flowing to the four quarters of the earth 'for the purification of the three worlds'. One cannot get away from the 'implex' and it is now necessary to consider the tale of a new skeleton map, alias skambha: the equinoctial colure had shifted to a position where it ran through stars of Auriga and through Rigel. Skambha, as we have said, was the World Tree consisting mostly of celestial coordinates, a kind of wildly imaginative armillary sphere. It all had to shift when one coordinate shifted." (Hamlet's Mill)
"In the Olympian creation myth, as Hesiod tells it in the Theogony, Uranus came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia, but he hated the children she bore him. Hesiod named their first six sons and six daughters the Titans, the three one-hundred-armed giants the Hekatonkheires, and the one-eyed giants the Cyclopes. Uranus imprisoned Gaia's youngest children in Tartarus, deep within Earth, where they caused pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to castrate Uranus. Only Cronus, youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the severed testicles into the sea. For this fearful deed, Uranus called his sons Titanes Theoi, or 'Straining Gods' ..." (Wikipedia) They were 'straining', I think, because they pushed forward, causing precession. ... They were Ranginui, the Sky Father, and Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother, both sealed together in a close embrace. Crushed between the weight of their bodies were their many children, whose oppression deepened. They yearned to be free; they fought their parents and each other to break loose. Tuumatauenga, virile god of war, thrust and shouted; Tangaroa of the oceans whirled and surged; Tawhirirangimaatea howled with many raging winds; Haumiatiketike and Rongomatane, of wild foods and cultivated crops tried their best but were not successful; and Ruamoko, god of earthquakes, yet to be born, struggled in the confinement of his mother's womb. Of them all, Taane Mahuta, the god of the forests, was the most determined; he set his sturdy feet upon his father's chest, and braced his upper back and shoulders against the bosom of his mother. He pushed; and they parted. So the world; as the Maori understand it; came into being ... In spring a light enters between earth and sky, and the phenomenon can be imagined as caused by someone straining to force them apart. And this 'person' could resonably also be responsible for spring arriving a day earlier about each 72 years (the precession). Notably the central place is illuminated - we can see in the painting The Castration of Uranus (by Giorgio Vasari and Cristofano Gherardi, c. 1560) - and it seems to be the place for 'Skambha'. Below is a black sphere, perhaps Earth, and above is a kind of circle, maybe the zodiacal band. The Auriga constellation is rising at the same time as Rigel. The equinoctial colure was here around (5 * 60 + 12) / 1440 * 26000 = 5600 years ago. Today my astronomy book puts Capella (α Aurigae) at 5h 13m, practically the same as the right ascension for Rigel. From this ancient time the precession of the equinoxes has slowly pushed 0h earlier and earlier and made Rigel and Capella rise later and later in the year. They now appear at the horizon in the east together with sun ca 312 / 1440 * 365.25 = 79 days after spring equinox (north of the equator). Betelgeuze, where Spring Sun seems to enter 'a dark house', is rising heliacally a further 10 days later. Orion and Auriga are rising together with Sun around midsummer (north of the equator). South of the equator, e.g. on Easter Island, they are rising heliacally around winter solstice. I guess the creator of the G text has put 'the king of shadows' (atariki) at winter solstice on Easter Island:
North of the equator there are 89 days from winter solstice to spring equinox:
At the same time south of the equator it is autumn equinox, located 266 days after winter solstice. From summer solstice to autumn equinox there are 266 - 177 = 89 days. In principle we can imagine Ga1-24 to be either at spring equinox north of the equator or at autumn equinox south of the equator. But I prefer instead to see atariki as a sign of winter solstice (south of the equator). The front side of the G tablet should begin where a new Sun is being born. Day number 408 (= 497 - 89) will then be at autumn equinox (= spring equinox north of the equator):
Perhaps the creator of the text was convinced a new era must begin 2000 years after the birth of Christ. 20 is the maximum number for counting in the night (using the fingers and toes) and therefore 20 centuries ought to be a limit. With 13 lunar months necessary to cover a solar year we can then deduce an ideal precessional cycle which measures 13 * 2000 = 26000 years. This explains why the right ascension positions of the stars in my astronomy book agrees with what we can read from the glyphs. Maybe the year when the text was created is related to Gb6-20:
For example could we count 2000 - (408 - 403) * 72 = 1640 A.D., at which time only 360 years would remain of the era of Christ (Pisces). The good condition of the G tablet is a sign of a rather late date of origin and presumably the work of the missionaries could by then have worked on the minds of the people on the island. Although the first of them (Joseph-Eugène Eyraud) did not arrive until 1864. |
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