2. When in summer Sun abruptly disappears - instead of gradually fading - it probably is because the sky suddenly is covered by rain clouds. These will give off valuable drops ('pearls') of sweet water which will make the dry earth revive and burst into life - the rain is like a water of life (vai ora): ... It was 4 August 1968, and it was the feast day of Saint Dominic, patron of Santo Domingo Pueblo, southwest of Santa Fe. At one end of the hot, dusty plaza, a Dominican priest watched nervously as several hundred dancers arranged in two long rows pounded the earth with their moccasined feet as a mighty, collective prayer for rain, accompanied by the powerful baritone singing of a chorus and the beat of drums. As my family and I viewed this, the largest and in some ways the most impressive Native American public ceremony, a tiny cloud over the Jémez Mountains to the northwest got larger and larger, eventually filling up the sky; at last the storm broke, and the sky was crisscrossed by lightning and the pueblo resounded with peals of rolling thunder ... 'Pearls' could also be associated with the horizontal 'beam' of time between the equinoxes, because at the horizon in the east new lights emerge, are born from Mother Earth - who then can be compared to a Mother-of-Pearl:
"Nacre appears iridescent because the thickness of the aragonite platelets is close to the wavelength of visible light. This results in constructive and destructive interference of different wavelengths of light, resulting in different colors of light being reflected at different viewing angles." (Wikipedia) The first stage of a newborn child is kaukau, a word which according to my rule of thumb should be the opposite of swimming (kau). A newborn will be delivered 'on the reef' (the border between 'water' and 'land'): ... Fakataka swims and swims, reaching another land. She goes there and stays on the upraised reef in the freshwater pools on the reef, and there delivers her child, a boy child. She gives him the name Taetagaloa. When the baby is born a golden plover flies over and alights upon the reef. (Kua fanau lā te pepe kae lele mai te tuli oi tū mai i te papa). And so the woman thus names various parts of the child beginning with the name 'the plover' (tuli): neck (tuliulu), elbow (tulilima), knee (tulivae) ... Fakataka means to form a circle and when a circle is closed it all begins anew. Taetagaloa means 'not Tagaroa' - the little boy does not belong out on the 'sea' but up on 'land'. A dry season is followed by a wet season and the wet season will be followed by a new dry season, like the changes from ebb to flood and back again accomplished by Moon. A change from 'ebb' to 'flood' (in the sky) could have been associated with Te Pei. Or more down to earth - the arrival of the life-giving rain will change our focus abruptly from following the rise of Sun in the sky to what happens down at our feet. I am forced to repeat what I have suggested earlier, not only to 'prove' for my reader that Te Pei plausibly could be located at the beginning of side b but also to remind myself of the picture which I am gradually piecing together. Raven, we remember (cfr at Eye in the Mud), tumbled down from the sky to the sea below, and then he climbed down from the surface of the sea to its bottom (a kind of reversed 'bird nester' story). He did not find eaglets but himself as very old, as his own 'grandfather': ... He turned round and round to the right as he fell from the sky back to the water. Still in his cradle, he floated on the sea. Then he bumped against something solid. 'Your illustrious grandfather asks you in', said a voice. The Raven saw nothing. He heard the same voice again, and then again, but still he saw nothing but water. Then he peered through the hole in his marten-skin blanket. Beside him was a grebe. 'Your illustrious grandfather asks you in', said the grebe and dived. Level with the waves beside him, the Raven discovered the top of a housepole made of stone. He untied himself from his cradle and climbed down the pole to the lowermost figure. Hala qaattsi ttakkin-gha, a voice said: 'Come inside, my grandson.' Behind the fire, at the rear of the house, was an old man white as a gull. 'I have something to lend you', said the old man. 'I have something to tell you as well. Dii hau dang iiji: I am you.' Slender bluegreen things with wings were moving between the screens at the back of the house. Waa'asing dang iiji, said the old man again: 'That also is you.' The old man gave the Raven two small sticks, like gambling sticks, one black, one multicoloured. He gave him instructions to bite them apart in a certain way and told him to spit the pieces at one another on the surface of the sea. The Raven climbed back up the pole, where he promptly did things backwards, just to see if something interesting would occur, and the pieces bounced apart. It may well be some bits were lost. But when he gathered what he could and tried again - and this time followed the instructions he had been given - the pieces stuck and rumpled and grew to become the mainland and Haida Gwaii ... In the Babylonian zodiac Raven stands at the end of the tail of the winged Serpent:
He seems to be looking down from his midair position to the watery Abyss below. We can be fairly certain that the meaning is to indicate that he is thirsty, because scattered over the earth there are myths about how he was not allowed to drink (understandable if he represents Sun): "M593. Takelma. 'The thirsty raven' There was no water in the village. The lakes and rivers were dry. Raven and Crow, two young girls who were having their first menstrual courses, were told to go and draw water from the ocean. Finding the journey too long, Raven decided just to urinate into her basket-bucket. She decieved no one and was severly scolded. Crow returned much later but with drinking water. As a punishment, Raven was condemned never to find water in the summer; only in winter would she find something to drink. For that reason the Raven never drinks during the hot months; she speaks with a raucous voice because of her dry throat ..." (Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man. Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 4.) And in Allen: "... the bird, being sent with a cup for water, loitered at a fig-tree till the fruit became ripe, and then returned to the god with a water-snake in his claws and a lie in his mouth, alleging the snake to have been the cause of the delay. In punishment he was forever fixed in the sky with the Cup and the Snake; and, we may infer, doomed to everlasting thirst by the guardianship of the Hydra over the Cup and its contents. From all this came other poetical names for our Corvus - Avis Ficarius, the Fig Bird; and Emansor, one who stays beyond his time; and a belief, in early folk-lore, that this alone among birds did not carry water to its young ..." |
