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7. The hem is the end of a cloth, a border created by doubling back the last piece, and we remember the Golden Fleece in which I imagined the golden specks of the stars in the night were collected. These were released at dawn as if to induce Sun to rise. A similar situation could occur beyond midsummer to induce the clouds to release their precious droplets of rain. Further back in time, at its very beginning, was the myth of Uranus covering Earth every night, like a black cloth (cfr at Auriga): ... 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' ... As if by coincidence Allen mentions the planet Uranus in connection with Tejat Prior (the 'fore-leg'): "Near this star Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus on the 13th of March, 1781. He thought it a comet, and its discovery as such was communicated to the Royal Astronomical Society on the 26th of April. Its true nature, however, first suspected by Maskelyne, was announced in the succeeding year by Lexell of Saint Petersburg and by La Place; and Herschel then published it on the 7th of November, 1782, as the Georgium Sidus, thus following Galileo, who, till he knew their true nature, had named Jupiter's satellites Sidera Cosmiana and Sidera Medicea, after his patron the 2d Cosmo di Medici, and Tardé, who had called the sun-spots Borbonica Sidera. Continental astronomers designated the planet as Herschel, and this in a much varied orthography, strangely erroneous cosidering the fame of its discoverer. We find it thus with La Lande in 1792; indeed, Herschel appeared as an alternative title in our text-books as late as fifty years ago; but Bode suggested the present Uranus to conform to the mythological nomenclature of the other planets, and because the name of the oldest god was specially applicable to the oldest - as the most distant - body then known in our system. Uranus, however, had been observed and noted as a star twenty-two times previously by various observers; these are called 'the ancient observations'; and Miss Clerke writes: 'There is, indeed, some reason to suppose that he had been detected as a wandering orb by savage watchers of the skies on the Pacific long before he swam into Herschel's ken.'¹ ¹ The Burmans, too, thought that there was an 8th planet, Rahū, but invisible; and the Hindus named other imaginary planets Kethu, Rethu, and Kulican; and figured Sani, their god Saturn, with a circle around him of intertwined serpents ages before Galileo's day; although this has had a very different explanation." I cannot avoid thinking that the creators of Manuscript E (who perhaps were well updated on recent astronomical discoveries) were alluding to Uranus when they compared Easter Island to a varu kaiga ('land 8'), very difficult to find, and if found and lost, then never to be found again. If Uranus should appear in the G text, then it could be in connection with the beginning of the 6th hour:
The little 'spur' at bottom right in Ga1-18 could indicate the rise of a little new one - ε Columbae is rising heliacally in day number 492. Beyond Ga1-19 a new dawn is evidently breaking, and in the glyph text it seems there is a 'hem' created - where the glyphs (days) of Saturn, Sun, and Moon are used once again. This indicates that the pair of pyramids for the godlike Pharaohs (Khafre and Khufu) - in contrast to the smaller pyramid for the humane Menkaure (at Mintaka) - stand at the beginning of the new dawn:
Counting from Ga1-20 (Alnilam, 'the string of pearls') there are 10 glyphs to the beautiful little Rei in Ga1-30 and Tejat Prior. A new one should be born in a day of Saturn and here 'the baby' could be glyph line a2:
The first of 12 glyphs at the beginning of line a2 is a great toki person with a short neck and Canopus is probably meant. But the Chinese could have regarded Tejat Prior ('the foreleg') as the true beginning, in which case we have 13 glyphs to count with (also to be read in number 1-30). "... the Chinese knew it [Tejat Prior] as Yuë, a Battle-ax ..." (Allen) |
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