rakau	Cb1-6

Rakau Raau, medicine, remedy, drug. Ra'a'u, scratch on the skin. Rakau, a plant. Râkau, goods, property. Vanaga. 1. Wood; rakau ta, cudgel, stick. P Pau.: rakau, tree, to dress a wound. Mgv.: rakau, wood, timber, a tree; medicine, a remedy; an object. Mq.: ákau, wood, tree. Ta.: raáu, id. 2. Medicine, remedy, potion, ointment, furniture, any precious object, resources, baggage, riches, heritage, dowry, merchandise, treasure, wealth; rakau hakaneinei, purgative; rakau nui, rich, opulent; rakau kore, poor, beggar, indigent, miserable, an inferior; hakakamikami ki te rakau, to impoverish; rakau o te miro, ballast. Mq.: akau, anything in general. The medicine sense is particularized in Tonga, Nukuoro, Hawaii, Tahiti, Mangareva, Paumotu. In no other speech does wood stand so fully for wealth of possessions, but it will be recalled that Rapanui is destitute of timber and depends wholly upon driftwood. Churchill.

There are 471 glyphs on the G tablet, but the intention was surely to present a calendar with 8 * 59 = 472 days. Therefore we can assume there was a day zero preceding Ga1-1. Cfr the Mayan names for their haab months:

... Time flows and the first notch for a 'night' (day) cannot be counted and carved into the wood until the first day has been measured out in full ...

Counting with a day zero also at the beginning of side a on the C tablet, we must conclude the position of a glyph will be its ordinal number in the text + 1. The time position of the complicated glyph Ca1-6 will therefore be day 398 + 1 = 399, which we might interpret as a confirmation of what we can perceive in the glyph - the cycle of time was here broken. I suggest we could understand this cycle to be that of Jupiter (Father Light), who at some time in autumn appeared to have been terminated (vanished) north of the equator.

If I am right we could then expect to find glyph number 377 to represent the end of the cycle of Saturn:

The last day of September could have been perceived as the last day of the northern summer. 273 = 3 * 91.

Alioth was a name for ε Ursa Majoris, at the root of the tail of the Great Bear, and the sickle or scythe is Saturn's instrument:

Although in Polynesia it was remembered that it was not the scythe of death but a spear (vero) which threatened to kill the earthly king at a certain time of the year:

... A vestige of the practice of putting the king to death at the end of a year's reign appears to have survived in the festival called Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the last month of the year. About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager described the custom as follows: 'The taboo Macahity is not unlike to our festival of Christmas. It continues a whole month, during which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival wherever he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in his richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the shore, followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks early, and must finish his excursion at sunrise.

The strongest and most expert of the warriors is chosen to receive him on his landing. The warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from a distance of about thirty paces, and the king must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there is no jesting in the business. Having caught it, he carries it under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or heavoo. On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and immediately the air is obscured by clouds of spears, made for the occasion with blunted ends. Hamamea (the king) has been frequently advised to abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in which he risks his life every year; but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to catch a spear as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity, all punishments are remitted throughout the country; and no person can leave the place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair be ever so important.'

 

... Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk-customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him Shu, dated his origin as '17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis'.

He carries an oak-club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are the acorn; the rock-dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rocks; the mistletoe, or Loranthus; and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the glans penis in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its names viscus (Latin) and ixias (Greek) are connected with vis and ischus (strength) - probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, sperm being the vehicle of life.

This Hercules is male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin, who is his tanist or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch - alternatively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest - and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic.

... The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk-customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the 'five-fold bond' which joins wrists, neck, and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone. His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder- or cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log.

The trunk is then uprooted and split into faggots which are added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down the river to an islet; though the head is sometimes cured with smoke and preserved for oracular use. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.

... The divine names Bran, Saturn, Cronos ... are applied to the ghost of Hercules that floats off in the alder-wood boat after his midsummer sacrifice. His tanist, or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who lighted Hercules' pyre and inherited his arrows, succeeds him for the second half of the year; having acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the representative of the White Goddess, and by eating some royal part of the dead man's body - heart, shoulder or thigh-flesh. He is in turn succeeded by the New Year Hercules, a reincarnation of the murdered man, who beheads him and, apparently, eats his head. This alternate eucharistic sacrifice made royalty continous, each king in turn the Sun-god beloved of the reigning Moon-goddess. But when these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system was gradually modified until a single king reigned for a term of years, Saturn-Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year ghost, permanently overthrown by Juppiter-Zeus-Belin though yearly conjured up for placation at the Saturnalia or Yule feast ...