4. This is how Makemson (in her The Morning Star Rises) retold the story of Piri-ere-ua, the Inseparable:

"Piri-ere-ua, Inseparable, was a little girl of Mangaia who, with her twin brother, became the double star m Scorpii, also called Pipiri. Their mother Tarakorekore was a scold, and she made them very unhappy, but the reason for their running away to the sky seems rather trivial. One night Tara fished on the reef until midnight and brought home a basket filled with delicious food. She wakened her husband Potiki and together they cooked and ate their supper. Potiki wished to awaken the children, but Tara said that it was better for them to sleep, and she put away their portion of food for morning.

In the meantime the children lay awake, sniffing the appetizing odors with longing and expecting to be called to partake of the meal. When their parents had gone to sleep they crept softly out of the house. Not long afterwards their parents realized they had gone and followed anxiously, tracing the route by the pools of tears where the children had sat a while and wept. Just before dawn, the mother and father traced them to a high rock, from which they had jumped to the sky, and looking up, beheld the children shining brightly in Scorpius. When the children refused to return in answer to their entreaties, the despairing parents leaped into the sky also and became two bright stars near the children."

I think one of the basic Signs to be understood in this myth is the idea of children stars being uplifted from the horizon before their parents, a strange phenomenon which applies to the tail of the Scorpion:

The explanation could be that Mother Scorpion carries her children on her back:

(Picture from an old encyclopedia.)

She had Cancer as her 'mother':

The Scorpion Mother is rising later than Cancer, with its 'heart' Antares (186) rising 144 days later than the 'fish-hook' at ω Gemini (42), and therefore she can hardly be the 'mother' of Cancer. It has to be the other way around.

The oddly reversed position of the children on the Scorpion Mother's back, who are protected by her upraised (Mushālah, λ Scorpii) sting tail, can be contrasted with how normal similar creatures (at least judged from my own experience when dining on shrimps) have their eggs below their tails - which are bent in the opposite direction compared to the tails of scorpions. But such tails are useful when swiming in the sea (and useless when walking on land).

The sting of the Scorpion could in Polynesian be named tara:

Tara 1. Thorn: tara miro. 2. Spur: tara moa. 3. Corner; te tara o te hare, corner of house; tara o te ahu, corner of ahu. Vanaga. (1. Dollar; moni tara, id.) 2. Thorn, spike, horn; taratara, prickly, rough, full of rocks. P Pau.: taratara, a ray, a beam; tare, a spine, a thorn. Mgv.: tara, spine, thorn, horn, crest, fishbone. Mq.: taá, spine, needle, thorn, sharp point, dart, harpoon; taa, the corner of a house, angle. Ta.: tara, spine, horn, spur, the corner of a house, angle. Sa.: tala, the round end of a house. Ma.: tara, the side wall of a house. 3. To announce, to proclaim, to promulgate, to call, to slander; tatara, to make a genealogy. P Pau.: fakatara, to enjoin. Mq.: taá, to cry, to call. 4. Mgv.: tara, a species of banana. Mq.: taa, a plant, a bird. Ma.: tara, a bird. 5. Ta.: tara, enchantment. Ma.: tara, an incantation. 6. Ta.: tara, to untie. Sa.: tala, id. Ha.: kala, id. Churchill

The name of the mother (λ Scorpii) was Tarakorekore and the double kore-kore ought to be translated as a double negative, 'not without', i.e. she indeed had a 'thorn' (was at a cardinal point):

Kore To lack, to be missing; without (something normally expected), -less; ana kore te úa, ina he vai when rain lacks there is no water: vî'e kenu kore, woman without a husband, i.e. widowed or abandoned by her husband. Vanaga. Not, without (koe); e kore, no, not; kore no, nothing, zero; kore noa, never, none; hakakore, to annul, to nullify, to annihilate, to abrogate, to acquit, to atone, to expiate, to suppress, a grudge. T Pau.: kore, not, without. Mgv.: kore, nothing, not, without, deprived of; akakore, to destroy, to annihilate. Mq.: kore, koé, óé, nothing, not, finished, done, dead, destroyed, annihilated, without. Ta.: ore, no, not, without. Korega, nothing, naught. Churchill.

The name of the father (υ Scorpii) was Potiki, which rings a bell (see in the Maui chapter):

... Now Taranga listened to all this in amazement. For in the custom of our people, if a child was born before it finished growing in its mother's womb and died without knowing any of the pleasures of life, it was supposed to be buried with special prayers and ceremonies, otherwise it became a kind of evil spirit, always doing mischief to the human race and hurting them out of spite, because of having missed the happiness that they enjoy. All the evil spirits had a beginning of this sort. So Maui was a little demi-god of mischief. The story he had told was true, and as his mother listened she remembered it all.

'From the time I was in your womb,' Maui went on, 'I have known the names of these children of yours. Listen,' he said as he pointed to his brothers in turn. 'You are Maui mua, you are Maui roto, you are Maui taha, and you are Maui pae. And as for me, I am Maui potiki, Maui-the-last-born. And here I am.'

When he had finished, Taranga had to wipe her eyes because there were tears in them, and she said: 'You are indeed my lastborn son. You are the child of my old age. When I had you, no one knew, and what you have been saying is the truth. Well, as you were formed out of my topknot you can be Maui tikitiki a Taranga.' So that became his name, meaning Maui-formed-in-the-topknot-of-Taranga. And this is very strange, because women in those days did not have topknots. The topknot was the most sacred part of a person, and only men had them ...

We can guess the mother of Maui was the Scorpion Mother. The name Taranga surely is to be read as Tara-nga ('thorns').

Poti Boat. Mgv., Mq., Ta.: poti, boat, canoe. The Mgv. tipoti, a small trough, and the Maori poti, a basket, lead Mr. Tregear to the note that this may be not an importation [from English boat]. Churchill. Mgv.: Potiki, children as the parents' support. Ta.: poti, a young girl. Mq.: poiti, poitii, child. Ma.: potiki, the youngest child. Churchill.

Mother Scorpion was anciently known under that name:

"... Earnest translators [of the Gilgamesh Epos] have seriously concluded that the 'sea' at the edge of which the barmaid dwells must be the Mediterranean, but there have also been votes for the Armenian mountains.

Yet the hero's itinerary suggests the celestial landscape instead, and the scorpion-men should be sought around Scorpius. The more so as lambda ypsilon Scorpii are counted among the Babylonian mashu-constellations, and these twins, lambda ypsilon, play an important role also in the so-called Babylonian Creation Epic, as weapons of Marduk.

In any case, Siduri, who must be closely related to Aegir and Ran of the Edda with their strange 'Bierstube', - as well as to the nun Gertrude, in whose public house the souls spent the first night after death ... - takes pity on Gilgamesh in his ragged condition, listens to his tale of woe but advises him to return home and make the best of his life.

Even Shamash comes to him and tells him: 'The life which thoust seekest thou wilt not find.' But Gilgamesh goes on being afraid of eternal sleep: 'Let mine eyes see the sun, that I may be sated with light'.

And he insists on being shown the way to Utnapishtim. Siduri warns: 'Gilgamesh, there never has been a crossing, and whoever from the days of old has come this far has not been able to cross the sea ... who besides Shamash crosses (it)?

Difficult is the place of crossing ... And deep are the waters of death, which bar its approaches'. And she warns him that, at the waters of death, 'there is Urshanabi, the boatman of Utnapishtim. Him let thy face behold'.

Siduri-Sabitu sits 'on the throne of the sea' (kussu tamtim), and W. F. Albright, picking up a notion of P. Jensen, thoroughly compares Siduri and Kalypso, whose island Ogygia is called by Homer 'the Navel of the Sea' (omphalos thalassēs).

Moreover, Albright points to 'the similar figure of Ishara tamtim', Ishara of the sea, the latter being the goddess of Scorpius, corresponding to the Egyptian Scorpius-goddess Selket, and to 'Mother Scorpion ... dwelling at the end of the Milky Way, where she receives the souls of the dead, and from her, represented as a mother with many breasts, at which children take suck, come the souls of the new-born'." (Hamlet's Mill)