... Maui now perched on the branch of a tree near his brothers, and there, just like a real kereru, he sat quite still in one place. He did not hop from bough to bough like other birds, but sat there cooing to himself. Which made his brothers coin our proverb, 'The stupid pigeon sits on one bough and does not hop from place to place.'

When Maui becomes a perching kereru he is no longer a manu rere (quickly flying beast) and this Sign should mean Sun has come to a standstill. Maui personifies the sun and he has reached a solstice. To perch (said of chickens on tree branches at night) is tau, which is alluded to in Tau-toru as the name for the Belt of Orion.

And suddenly we can perceive these 3 great 'stones' (stars) in the sky as the resting place for 3 'birds', for instance the 3 Pharaohs, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure (to mention them in withershins order). The lastmentioned was more 'down to earth' and had a much shorter life span than the first two, perhaps because he was only a human taking on the 'costume' of a Pharaoh (cfr at A Common Sign Vocabulary):

... Instead of that old, dark, terrible drama of the king's death, which had formerly been played to the hilt, the audience now watched a solemn symbolic mime, the Sed festival, in which the king renewed his pharaonic warrant without submitting to the personal inconvenience of a literal death ...

The right ascension determined by Orion and Columba has also Lepus (a constellation surely ruled by Moon) and we can guess Taranga personifies the moon. Hares do not take care of their young says the proverb:

... Did she feed us and look after us until we grew up? Not a bit of it ...

Taranga is said to regularly in the early mornings go down through a hole among the rushes:

... Not far away he saw her stop and pull up a clump of rushes. There was a hole under it, which she dropped into. She pulled the rushes into place behind her, and was gone. Maui slipped out and ran as fast as he was able to the clump of rushes. He pulled it and it came away, and he felt a wind against his face as he looked through the hole. Looking down, he saw another world, with trees and the ocean, and fires burning, and men and women walking about ...

Moon goes down in the east, and there should be hole there. The clump of rushes (cfr the reeds in the picture below) is probably a Sign to indicate the first period for Sun, Ce Acatl as the Mexicans said (cfr at Adjuncts):

... All this, which in so many ways parallels the normal imagery of the Old World culture-hero myths, telling of the one who is gone, dwells underground in a happy, timeless land, as lord of the realm of the happy dead, like Osiris, but will rise again, we can read without surprise. But what is surprising indeed was the manner of Quetzalcoatl's actual return. The priests and astrologers did not know in what cycle he was to reappear; however, the name of the year within the cycle had been predicted, of old, by Quetzalcoatl himself. Its sign was 'One Reed' (Ce Acatl), which, in the Mexican calendar, is a year that occurs only once in every cycle of fifty-two. But the year when Cortes arrived, with his company of fair-faced companions and his standard, the cross, was precisely the year 'One Reed'. The myth of the dead and resurrected god had circumnavigated the globe ...

The reeds are the first of the 'trees' one encounters when arriving by sea. Reeds can be used for thatching roofs but also when constructing reed boats.

"A famous story involving bulrushes is that of the Ark of bulrushes, in which the infant Moses was found. Within the context of the story, this is probably paper reed (Cyperus papyrus)." (Wikipedia)

Rushes and reeds thrive on wetland and there is a whole world of different kinds of them:

"... The canna-reed, which grows from a thick root like a tree, was an ancient symbol of royalty in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Pharaohs used reed scepters (hence Egypt is satiriziced by the prophet Isaiah as a 'bruised reed') and a royal reed was put into Jesus's hand when we was attired in Scarlet. It is the tree from which arrows were cut, and therefore appropriate to a Pharaoh as a living Sun-god who shot off his arrows in every direction as a symbol of sovereignity ..." (The White Goddess)

En passent we should take care to remember the 'bruised reed' when later contemplating the meaning of the 10th (or the 8th according to my enumeration) kuhane station Hatinga Te Kohe (where she broke the 'bamboo' with her feet).

We should also observe that it is the thick root - below the surface of the water - which is a 'tree'. The 'tree' (= the King) is submerged. The canna-reed is not a true reed but a kind of lily, we could say water-lily, in the order Zingiberales, which - significantly - includes ginger, a not very straight 'tree' (cfr at Kava):

In order to substantiate my claim that the King is the Tree I need an example from Maya Cosmos:

"Most of the people in our van took advantage of the interlude to shop at the nearby stalls set up by highland Maya who had come down to Tikal to take advantage of the steady supply of tourists.

However, one of our group, Harriet Gillett, a retired physician and an inveterate bird-watcher, had other interests. She noticed a nearby tree heavy with white blossoms and surrounded by a raucous sphere of birds and bees. She climbed out of the van with her binoculars around her neck, and walked over to take advantage of the unexpected opportunity the morning had provided. Our local guide, Francisco Florián, who knew the forest and its creatures in an unusually intimate way, joined her, explaining that the birds came to the tree only early in the morning. The sounds and the odd sight finally drew my attention and I too disembarked from the van and edged closer to the buzzing center of the action.

I stared at the screaming birds as they fought for positions among the flowers and the hovering drone of thousands of bees. How beautiful, I thought, and then my gaze happened to settle on the trunk of the tree. It had thorns and it bulged just above the ground. It was a young ceiba tree.

I already knew that the ceiba tree was the model for the sacred World Tree of the Maya, but I had never seen one in flower when I knew what I was looking at. I was really excited because normally you can't see the blossoms even if you're there when the tree is in blossom. The fully mature trees are hundreds of feet high, and the blossoms are very small. 'It's a ceiba', I chirped and began looking for a branch low enough to see one of the blossoms up close. Joyce Livingstone, a retired teacher, did the logical thing. She bent over, picked up a fallen branch, and held it out for me to see. I was too excited and full of myself to listen. She tapped my arm more insistently and still I didn't hear her. Finally, in frustration, she grabbed my wrist and raised her voice. 'Will you look at these?' she said, waving the branch, and finally I did.

What I saw stunned me, for in her hand lay a perfect replica of the earflares worn by the Classic Maya kings. Suddenly I understood the full symbolism of so many of the things I had been studying for years. The kings dressed themselves as the Wakah-Chan tree, although at the time I didn't know it was also the Milky Way.

The tzuk [partition] head on the trunk of the tree covered their loins. The branches with their white flowers bent down along their thighs, the double-headed ecliptic snake rested in their arms, and the great bird Itzam-Yeh stood on their head. I already knew as I stood under the young tree in Tikal that the kings were the human embodiment of the ceiba as the central axis of the world. As I stood there gazing at the flowers in Joyce's hand, I also learned that the kings embodied the ceiba at the moment it flowers to yield the sak-nik-nal, the 'white flowers', that are the souls of human beings. As the trees flowers to reproduce itself, so the kings flowered to reproduce the world."

In The Rain God I have presented the quartet 'walking on land' (3), 'up in the tree' (4), 'inside earth' (5), and 'wading in water' (6), where a water-lily (naab in Mayan) is the 'instrument' of the 6th phase:

The peculiar 4th station can possibly be understood as the time when the 'Tree' is reproducing itself. The gesture of 'embracing' could also mean the King (down on earth) 'becomes' the cosmic tree.

Maybe the hole through which - when Sun went up - first Taranga and then, somewhat later, little Maui went down refers to the eye hole, surrounded by leaves, (which Bode has drawn):

Or maybe this 'key hole' is the same as that which little Alice went down, following not a hare but a rabbit:

"The Moon rabbit in folklore is a rabbit that lives on the moon ... The story exists in many cultures, particularly in Aztec mythology and East Asian folklore, where it is seen pounding in a mortar and pestle. In Chinese folklore, it is often portrayed as a companion of the moon goddess Chang'e, constantly pounding the elixir of life for her; but in Japanese and Korean versions, it is just pounding the ingredients for rice cake ..." (Wikipedia)

In Polynesia the pounding was for white tapa (cfr at Ure Honu):

... There was noise at night at Marioro, it was Hina beating tapa in the dark for the god Tangaroa, and the noise of her mallet was annoying that god, he could endure it no longer. He said to Pani, 'Oh Pani, is that noise the beating of tapa?' and Pani answered, 'It is Hina tutu po beating fine tapa.'

Then Tangaroa said, 'You go to her and tell her to stop, the harbour of the god is noisy.' Pani therefore went to Hina's place and said to her, 'Stop it, or the harbour of the god will be noisy.' But Hina replied, 'I will not stop, I will beat out white tapa here as a wrapping for the gods Tangaroa, 'Oro, Moe, Ruanu'u, Tu, Tongahiti, Tau utu, Te Meharo, and Punua the burst of thunder'. So Pani returned and told the god that Hina would not stop.

'Then go to her again', said Tangaroa, 'and make her stop. The harbour of the god is noisy!' So Pani went again, and he went a third time also, but with no result. Then Pani too became furious with Hina, and he seized her mallet and beat her on the head. She died, but her spirit flew up into the sky, and she remained forever in the moon, beating white tapa. All may see her there. From that time on she was known as Hina nui aiai i te marama, Great-Hina-beating-in-the-Moon ...

'The burst of thunder', Punua, has a name which could be relevant in the present investigation. It probably is to be read as Pu-nua, where nua means both mother, blanket, and a host of other things, whichs open up interesting possibilities for allusion:

Nua

1. Mother; this seems a more ancient word than matu'a poreko. 2. Blanket, clothing, cape formerly made from fibres of the mahute tree. Vanaga.

Cloak T. Churchill.

Nu'a 1. Thick; piled one on top of the other, as leis, mats, or ocean swells; heaped; lush, thick-growing; much traveled, as a road; multitude, as of people, mass. Also hānu'a. Moena kumu nu'a, a sleeping mat made thick at one end to serve as a head rest; lit. 'mat piled beginning'. Nu'a moena, a heap of mats. Nu'a kanaka, many people. Haki nu'a ka uahi i ke kai, the spray breaks in masses in the sea. Ka nu'a o ka palai, the thick clump of palai ferns. Ho'o nu'a, to heap up; to give generously and continuously; to indulge, as a child; surging, rising in swells, as the sea. 2. A kind of seaweed. Nu'a-kea, a goddess of lactation. Wehewehe.

Nuahine

Nuahine. 1. Old woman. 2. Ko te Nuahine ká umu a ragi kotekote, ancient name of 'the woman in the moon' inspired by the resemblance of its landscape with the likeness of a woman sitting, lighting the fire of her oven. Vanaga.

Nuehine. Old woman. Churchill.

"[Englert 1948, 165:] '... se selia nombrar Ko te Nuahine káumu à rangi kote kote que significa: La vieja que enciende el curanto en el cielo kotekote. Puedo haber sido una personificación de la luna porque las viejos decían, comentando este nombre, que no es una montaña que seve en la luna, sino una mujer anciana que está suntada [sentada?] al lado un gran curanto umu pae (de piedras en circulo)." (Barthel)