The Egyptian achet (horizon, with suffix -t for female) hieroglyph depicted the horizon in the east with the rising Sun head born between a pair of mountain knees:
... The water dots invite us to count, and one of several possible structures is:
46 + 91 = 137, which could point at May 17 (137). But the last of the water dots is special and we should probably instead count 46 + 90 = 136 (May 16), when at the time of rongorongo and according to the Gregorian calendar Alcyone rose with the Sun ... Therefore this scene of birth was not identical with the scene of Hat-hor (the House of Horus), which came earlier:
The 'house' (Lady of Every Joy) was probably corresponding to Bharani and the Pleiades would then be 14 days later: ... In the inscriptions of Dendera, published by Dümichen, the goddess Hathor is called 'lady of every joy'. For once, Dümichen adds: Literally ... 'the lady of every heart circuit'. This is not to say that the Egyptians had discovered the circulation of the blood. But the determinative sign for 'heart' often figures as the plumb bob at the end of a plumb line coming from a well-known astronomical or surveying device, the merkhet. Evidently, 'heart' is something very specific, as it were the 'center of gravity' ... See Aeg.Wb. 2, pp. 55f. for sign of the heart (ib) as expressing generally 'the middle, the center'. And this may lead in quite another direction. The Arabs preserved a name for Canopus - besides calling the star Kalb at-tai-man ('heart of the south') ... Suhail el-wezn, 'Canopus Ponderosus', the heavy-weighing Canopus, a name promptly declared meaningless by the experts, but which could well have belonged to an archaic system in which Canopus was the weight at the end of the plumb line, as befitted its important position as a heavy star at the South Pole of the 'waters below'. Here is a chain of inferences which might or might not be valid, but it is allowable to test it, and no inference at all would come from the 'lady of every joy'. The line seems to state that Hathor (= Hat Hor, 'House of Horus') 'rules' the revolution of a specific celestial body - whether or not Canopus is alluded to - or, if we can trust the translation 'every', the revolution of all celestial bodies. As concerns the identity of the ruling lady, the greater possibility speaks for Sirius, but Venus cannot be excluded; in Mexico, too, Venus is called 'heart of the earth'. The reader is invited to imagine for himself what many thousands of such pseudo-primitive or poetic interpretations must lead to: a disfigured interpretation of Egyptian intellectual life ...
The 29th night of the Moon was the place of birth for the next month: ... When the new moon appeared women assembled and bewailed those who had died since the last one, uttering the following lament: 'Alas! O moon! Thou has returned to life, but our departed beloved ones have not. Thou has bathed in the waiora a Tane, and had thy life renewed, but there is no fount to restore life to our departed ones. Alas ... Similarly we can count 29 nights from April 17 (107) to May 16 (136):
There was an idea of a spear (vero) at the Pleiades. In ancient Egypt there was also a kind of spear at the nose of the nighttime ship of the Sun:
This spear prow was aimed at a net, we can see. And having understood that the early morning could be both after the winter solstice (as in the Gregorian calendar) and in early April (after the northern spring equinox), we can connect this net with what happened on Hawaii: ... in the ceremonial course of the coming year, the king is symbolically transposed toward the Lono pole of Hawaiian divinity ... It need only be noticed that the renewal of kingship at the climax of the Makahiki coincides with the rebirth of nature. For in the ideal ritual calendar, the kali'i battle follows the autumnal appearance of the Pleiades, by thirty-three days - thus precisely, in the late eighteenth century, 21 December, the winter solstice. The king returns to power with the sun. Whereas, over the next two days, Lono plays the part of the sacrifice. The Makahiki effigy is dismantled and hidden away in a rite watched over by the king's 'living god', Kahoali'i or 'The-Companion-of-the-King', the one who is also known as 'Death-is-Near' (Koke-na-make). Close kinsman of the king as his ceremonial double, Kahoali'i swallows the eye of the victim in ceremonies of human sacrifice ... The 'living god', moreover, passes the night prior to the dismemberment of Lono in a temporary house called 'the net house of Kahoali'i', set up before the temple structure where the image sleeps. In the myth pertinent to these rites, the trickster hero - whose father has the same name (Kuuka'ohi'alaki) as the Kuu-image of the temple - uses a certain 'net of Maoloha' to encircle a house, entrapping the goddess Haumea; whereas, Haumea (or Papa) is also a version of La'ila'i, the archetypal fertile woman, and the net used to entangle her had belonged to one Makali'i, 'Pleiades'. Just so, the succeeding Makahiki ceremony, following upon the putting away of the god, is called 'the net of Maoloha', and represents the gains in fertility accruing to the people from the victory over Lono. A large, loose-mesh net, filled with all kinds of food, is shaken at a priest's command. Fallen to earth, and to man's lot, the food is the augury of the coming year. The fertility of nature thus taken by humanity, a tribute-canoe of offerings to Lono is set adrift for Kahiki, homeland of the gods. The New Year draws to a close. At the next full moon, a man (a tabu transgressor) will be caught by Kahoali'i and sacrificed. Soon after the houses and standing images of the temple will be rebuilt: consecrated - with more human sacrifices - to the rites of Kuu and the projects of the king ... The correspondence between the winter solstice and the kali'i rite of the Makahiki is arrived at as follows: ideally, the second ceremony of 'breaking the coconut', when the priests assemble at the temple to spot the rising of the Pleiades, coincides with the full moon (Hua tapu) of the twelfth lunar month (Welehu). In the latter eighteenth century, the Pleiades appear at sunset on 18 November. Ten days later (28 November), the Lono effigy sets off on its circuit, which lasts twenty-three days, thus bringing the god back for the climactic battle with the king on 21 December, the solstice (= Hawaiian 16 Makali'i). The correspondence is 'ideal' and only rarely achieved, since it depends on the coincidence of the full moon and the crepuscular rising of the Pleiades ... In the deep night before the image [of Lono] is first seen, there is a Makahiki ceremony called 'splashing-water' (hi'uwai). Kepelino tells of sacred chiefs being carried to the water where the people in their finery are bathing; in the excitement created by the beauty of their attire, 'one person was attracted to another, and the result', says this convert to Catholicism, 'was by no means good'. At dawn, when the people emerged from their amorous sport, there standing on the beach was the image of Lono. White tapa cloth and skins of the ka'upu bird hang from the horizontal bar of the tall crosspiece image. The ka'upu is almost certainly the albatross, a migratory bird that appears in the western Hawaiian chain - the white Lanyon albatross at Ni'ihau Island - to breed and lay eggs in October-November, or the beginning of the Makahiki season ...
Tau-ono (the 6 'stones' rising together in the day before Alcyone followed by Pleione and Atlas) was illustrated as a hau tea type of glyph with 'eyes' in both directions (like Janus in January). And precisely the same hau tea was also 23 days earlier, when Arcturus was at the Full Moon:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
