In the beginning there was only the dome of the sky above the waters. The sky dome was firm and there was also a firm bowl form holding the water.
These two gigantic half-bowls must come in contact with each other and their contact circle is the horizon.
At dawn and dusk, at the equinoxes, colours appear at the horizon. Birds start to sing or go to sleep. All the senses wake up or close down. The horizon is where changes occur.
"The swinging doors theme, which is found all the world over, belongs most certainly to the oldest mythic tradition known to man.
The same is probably true of the swing, around which the American Indians built up a whole mythology ...; swings existed in real life, particularly among the Salish, whose various dialects distinguished between the cradle-swing - 'suspended from a long thin pole stuck in the ground and the upper end bent over ... the weight of the child being sufficient ... to allow the cradle to swing gently up and down with the movements of the child, which were kept up by a cord attached to the cradle and given to the mother or one of the old women of the household to pull from time to time' ...
... and the seat swing, which at least among certain groups had a ceremonial or ritual use, reserved, it would seem, for adult women ..." (The Naked Man)
The 'great wall' which Blue-Jay crossed into the land of the dead presumably is the sphere of the firmanent:
'... After several attempts, Blue-Jay succeeded in crossing the great wall, cut horizontally in two with the two halves beating one against the other, which guarded the land of the dead, where the stolen child, now grown to manhood, was living ...'
A horizontal cut by the horizon defines sky and watery bowl. The two halves are beating one against the other, of course creating a lot of noise (and implicitly colours etc).
As we can see from the picture of the Blue Jay (ref. Wikipedia) he has succeeded to enter the dark wintery half by crossing the border in the west, past the snapping teeth:
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'What's she like, Hine nui te Po?' asked Maui. 'Look over there', said Makea, pointing to the ice-cold mountains beneath the flaming clouds of sunset. 'What you see there is Hine nui, flashing where the sky meets the earth. Her body is like a woman's, but the pupils of her eyes are greenstone and her hair is kelp. Her mouth is that of a barracuda, and in the place where men enter her she has sharp teeth of obsidian and greenstone.' |
He may have lost some tail-feathers:
| "... In Greek mythology, the Symplegades, also known as the Cyanean Rocks or Clashing Rocks were a pair of rocks at the Bosporus that clashed together randomly. They were defeated by Jason and the Argonauts, who would have been lost and killed by the rocks except for Phineas' advice. Jason let a dove fly between the rocks; it lost only its tail feathers. The Argonauts rowed mightily to get through and lost only part of the stern ornament. After that, the Symplegades stopped moving permanently. The Romans called them cyaneae insulae ..." (Wikipedia) |