Captain Cook was murdered because he had been identified with Lono (Rogo), the god due to leave at the beginning of the year - but he returned already after a few days! "Cook's first visit, to Kaua'i Island in January 1778, fell within the traditional months of the New Year rite (Makahiki). He returned to the Islands late in the same year, very near the recommencement of the Makahiki ceremonies. Arriving now off northern Maui, Cook proceeded to make a grand circumnavigation of Hawai'i Island in the prescribed clockwise direction of Lono's yearly procession, to land at the temple in Kealakekua Bay where Lono begins and ends his own circuit. The British captain took his leave in early February 1779, almost precisely on the day the Makahiki ceremonies closed. But on his way out to Kahiki, the Resolution sprung a mast, and Cook committed the ritual fault of returning unexpectedly and unintelligibly. The Great Navigator was now hors catégorie, a dangerous condition as Leach and Douglas have taught us, and within a few days he was really dead - though certain priests of Lono did afterward ask when he would come back." (Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History.)
... 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 ...
We should try to correlate the Rogo type of glyph with the god at the beginning of the new year.
The narrow waist of Rogo in Ca3-25 (3-25) could have been a sign corresponding to the narrow waist of puo in Ca3-11 - a sign alluding to the 'breaking of the coco-nut' ceremonies, which possibly on Easter Island could have been due around the time when the Full Moon reached November 18: ... When viewed on end, the endocarp and germination pores give the fruit the appearance of a coco (also Côca), a Portuguese word for a scary witch from Portuguese folklore, that used to be represented as a carved vegetable lantern, hence the name of the fruit. The specific name nucifera is Latin for nut-bearing ...
None of the Rogo glyphs in G were designed with such an extremely narrow waist. Instead we should count 8 days (corresponding to the 8 dark nights of invisibility for Venus) from heliacal Alcyone and Atlas in May 16 (136) to reach May 24 (144) - with a 'coco-nut break' illustrated in form of an absent glyph space: South of the equator, on Easter Island, they looked for the stars in the early mornings. North of the equator, on Hawaii, they looked for the stars in the early evenings. Therefore, when on Easter Island the heliacal coco-nut break could have been due - where once upon a time the Sun had reached the Hyades Gate - the Full Moon would have been at the Gregorian calendar date °November 18, at the Yed door in Ophiuchus.
"It was the most generous welcome ever accorded any European voyage of discovery in this ocean. 'Anchored in 17 fathoms black sand', reads a midshipman's log, 'amidst an Innumerable Number of Canoes, the people in which were singing & rejoicing all the way'. They were singing! Nor in all his experience had Captain Cook ever seen so many Polynesians assembled as were here in Kealakekua Bay. Besides the innumerable canoes, Hawaiians were clambering over the Resolution and Discovery, lining the beaches, and swimming in the water 'like shoals of fish'. Perhaps there were 10,000, or five times as many people as normally lived here. And not a weapon to be seen among them, Cook remarked. Instead, the canoes were laden with pigs, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, sugar cane: everything the island produced. Also the women 'seemed remarkably anxious to engage themselves to our people'. A priest came on board and wrapped Captain Cook in the red tapa-cloth decoration of a temple image, then made the offering of a sacrificial pig. On shore, the priest led the Great Navigator by the hand to the temple of Hikiau. Hearing the herald's cry 'O Lono', the people on their passage flew to their houses or prostrated face to ground. Lono is the god associated with natural growth and human reproduction who annually returns to the Islands with the fertilizing rains of winter; he is also an ancient king come in search of his sacred bride. In January 1779, at the temple, Captain Cook was put through the customary rites of welcome to Lono. As the priests Koa'a and Lt. King held his arms outstretched and the appropriate sacrifices were made, Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon (constructed of wood staves) which is the appearance of the god. It was a ceremony of the Makahiki, the great Hawaiian New Year Festival." (Sahlins)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
