8. On the G tablet (Small Santiago) the method of dividing 364 days into 104 + 260 is used on its 'front side' (side a). I have counted each glyph as one day:
In Gb5-10 there is a 'glyph play' variant of vaha kai, where vaha means 'opening' and where I prefer to translate kai as 'swallowing'. Vaha kai is 'an opening which swallows'. But one of the intended meanings of Gb5-10 is to illustrate an ear - it is not the picture of a mouth ready to swallow Sun at the end of the year. The opening does not lead downwards, it leads horizontally, presumably with Sun reappearing through the opposite ear fit for fight again next spring (or morning). The mouth cannot be the proper route for Sun: "Certain Polynesian customs can more easily be understood by us if they are seen as a straight reversal of things we do ourselves. The Maori custom of weeping over friends or relatives when they return, rather than when they go away, is one example, which has a logic not impossible to grasp. A similar straight reversal is found in regard to food. The Polynesian notion of the lowest thing, the most devoid of sacredness, was cooked food: not what comes out of the body, but what goes into it ... All these are instances of the Polynesian curse involving food - the strongest obscenity they had, and one of immense releasing power. If it seems meaningless to us, that is presumably because we are incapable of imagining the ultimate act itself - the eating of another person's flesh. That it had such force for the Polynesians was surely just because he could imagine doing that ..." (Antony Alpers, Legends of the South Seas.) When Sun is moving away from the 'front side' to the 'back side' (under the earth after having disappeared at the horizon in the west) it is like when we turn the head around from the front side (the face) to the back of the head. At the border line between the face and the back of the head we find the ears (tariga). The upper end of a sugarcane, which was used in military training as a harmless weapon, was called tari (and tariga is 'the location of tari'). The main meaning of tari, though, is to 'take from one place to another'. The vaha kai sign as a mouth can be seen on this 'dance paddle':
The long hanging ears have earplugs in them and these are formed into the symbol for Sun, like circular eyes with small pupils in their centers. Pupils cannot be large in intensive light. |
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