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TRANSLATIONS
The link 'the normal order of
time' leads to the following pages:
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In our days we have ceased to
wonder, but once people were thoughtful. We have eyes which magically
can 'move us' to the far distances in an instant, giving us a 'room'
(space) where the 'walls' are infinitely far away. This Mayan picture of an
astronomer (from Skywatchers) makes the point:
His eye is reaching
out to the stars surrounding him where he is sitting in the dark
center of the universe.
Light arrives
instantaneously. The speed of light, it can be argued, is infinite
because nothing travels faster. In fact, it is a basic component of our
own space-time cosmic frame of today.
During the day our
eyes play a dominat role among our senses. The rest have to wait until
darkness in order to be 'heard' properly. These secondary senses
are of two kinds: those for use close up (feeling, smelling, tasting
etc) and those for medium distance (hearing, the warmth from a fire,
etc). Next to our eyes in importance is our ears.
Telling stories at
the camp fire will transport minds to far away ancient places.
If time can move backwards it should be in the night, not in
daytime.
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The infinite speed of
the light rays originating from Sun means there is no room for time.
Nothing can happen in the instant between observer and observed, and
time does not count.
Conversely, during a dark night it is space which does not exist. Therefore it
is natural to let Moon (whose domain is the night) be the leader when counting time.
The stars shine in the
night and the stories by the warming fire will be told against the
background of their illumination. The Golden Age and the shifting of
the 'framework' certainly would be used to support the wellknown
stories, told time and again by master storytellers. The starry dome
of the sky would serve well as a 'frame story', like the Arabian
'one more' version, One Thousand and One Nights. Significantly Scheherazade
was a woman:
"... On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade
begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is
thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the
conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she
begins (and only begins) a new one, and the king, eager to
hear the conclusion, postpones her execution once again. So it goes
on for 1,001 nights ..." (Wikipedia)
In a way time will
disappear when attention is caught by a fascinating story. Or
in general, when the mind is extremely focused to the exclusion of
everything else.
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In my early teens I
happened to read in the Swedish version of Reader's Digest about
some villages up in the Pyreneean Alps which clearly were
distributed in the geography according to the distribution of some stars in
the sky.
I was fascinated, but
I have not been able to find the article again.
"... In classical
mythology, Pyrene is a princess who gave her name to the
Pyrenees. The Greek historian Herodotus says Pyrene is the name of a
town in Celtic Europe. According to Silius Italicus, she was the
virginal daughter of Bebryx, a king in Mediterranean Gaul by
whom the hero Hercules was given hospitality during his quest
to steal the cattle of Geryon during his famous Labors.
Hercules, characteristically drunk and lustful, violates the sacred
code of hospitality and rapes his host's daughter. Pyrene gives
birth to a serpent and runs away to the woods, afraid that her
father will be angry. Alone, she pours out her story to the trees,
attracting the attention instead of wild beasts who tear her to
pieces.
After his victory over
Geryon, Hercules passes through the kingdom of Bebryx again, finding
the girl's lacerated remains. As is often the case in stories of
this hero, the sober Hercules responds with heartbroken grief and
remorse at the actions of his darker self, and lays Pyrene to rest
tenderly, demanding that the surrounding geography join in mourning
and preserve her name: 'struck by the Herculean voice, the mountaintops
shudder at the ridges; he kept crying out with a sorrowful noise
Pyrene! and all the rock-cliffs and wild-beast haunts echo back
Pyrene! … The mountains hold on to the wept-over name through the
ages ..." (Wikipeida, also the map above)
We recognize the
theme of limbs torn apart and spread around the countryside, e.g.:
... the two women placed Osiris's coffer on a boat,
and when the goddess Isis was alone with it at sea, she opened the
chest and, laying her face on the face of her brother, kissed him
and wept. The myth goes on to tell of the blessed boat's arrival in
the marshes of the Delta, and of how Set, one night hunting the boar
by the light of the full moon, discovered the sarcophagus and tore
the body into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad ... The
four bereaved and searching divinities, the two mothers and their
two sons, were joined by a fifth, the moon-god Thoth (who appears
sometimes in the form of an ibis-headed scribe, at other times in
the form of a baboon), and together they found all of Osiris save
his genital member, which had been swallowed by a fish ...
Maybe this was the
reason for the distribution of the villages. Limbs are like
stretches of time, like periods in the calendar. And the calendar is
mapped from the stars. The great period of Spring Sun (Hercules),
for example, is a giant single 'leg'.
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"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 White Goddess)
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"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 White Goddess)
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"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." (The White Goddess)
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The idea to map the
features on the ground (Earth) to fit the patterns of the stars in
the sky is not farfetched, given that we consider how Ragi and
Papa were torn apart to let in the light, how their primal embrace
was disrupted. Sky should have left his imprint on Earth.
The south side of
Easter Island was mapped from the path of the Moon, we can read in
Barthel 2. And the north side was mapped after the path of
the Sun. The canoe of the Moon lies lower down (south) than the domain of
the Sun.
In other words, by
moving in space you can travel also in time. When the explorers (cfr
at ragi) under the command of Ira moved up from
Hanga Te Pau (presumably day 366 at Gb5-12) they also moved in
time:
... The canoe continued
its exploration and in a sweep sailed on to Hanga Te Pau.
They went ashore and took the food with them. They pulled the canoe
onto the beach and left it there. Ira sat down with all the
other (companions) and spoke to Makoi: 'You shall mark the
land for me and make it known (by its names)!' After that, Ira
spoke these words: 'This is the digging stick (? ko koko),
Kuukuu. You shall work the land for me and plant the yam roots!'
Makoi
named the place Hanga Te Pau, 'the landing site of Ira'.
So that they would remember (? he aringa, literally, 'as
face'), the open side of Hanga Te Pau was given this name.
Ira got up. They all climbed to the top of the hill. They
climbed up on the tenth day of the month of June ('Maro').
They reached the side crater (te manavai) and looked around
carefully. Makoi said, 'This is the Manavai of Hau
Maka'. They climbed farther and reached the top. They saw the
dark abyss and the large hole (of the crater Rano Kau). They
all said, 'Here it is, young men, the dark abyss of Hau Maka.'
They made camp and constructed a house. Kuukuu got up,
worked the ground, and heaped up the earth for the yam roots ...
The naming of the
features of the land is the work of Makoi and he must - I
think - follow the stars in the sky to get it right.
Kuukuu
is ordained to look in the opposite direction, to use the digging stick (like Khnum), and
this must be done at the proper time - and therefore also at the proper
place, which motivates the path the explorers took:
... Hanga Te Pau lies
halfway between the places Kioe Uri and Piringa Aniva,
both of which are also designations for the month of June. In this
sense, Hanga Te Pau occupies the correct position in the
time-space scheme. Instead of turning to the right (facing the land)
in their search for the residence of the king, the explorers turn in
the opposite direction. From a chronological point of view, this
turning to the left signifies a going back to the two winter months
that have passed. Considering the condition in the new land,
building a house on the rim of the crater and establishing a yam
plantation are indeed suitable activities for the new settlers ...
Once again we find 2
winter months preceding the front side of the year.
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It is easy to go
backward in time if you have the right kind of upbringing, if you
have 'culture', if you know your roots, have heard all the wonderful
old stories retold so many times you know them 'by heart'.
For us this is now a
lost world, we have no past (especially so in Sweden). Instead we
(all of us as separate individuals)
imagine us capable of planning for the future, to see what must be
done. Our eyes are blue and lying (for instance are we always underestimating the
time and cost it takes to accomplish something). The elephants know the value
of past experience, relying on the oldest in the herd - but not we.
Any past experience is obsolete, and the past is coming closer and
closer.
The Polynesians,
however, knew the value of accumulated knowledge:
"For the Maori the past is an
important and pervasive dimension of the present and future.
Often referred to as the 'ever-present now', Maori social
reality is perceived as though looking back in time from the
past to the present.
The Maori word for 'the front
of' is mua
and this is used as a
term to describe the past, that is, Nga wa o mua or the
time in front of us. Likewise, the word for the back is
muri
which is a term that is
used for the future.
Thus the past is in front of
us, it is known; the future is behind us, unknown. The point of
this is that our ancestors always had their backs to the future
with their eyes firmly on the past.
Our past is not conceived as
something long ago and done with, known only as an historical
fact with no contemporary relevance or meaning. In the words of
a respected Maori elder:
The present is a
combination of the ancestors and 'their living faces' or genetic
inheritors, that is the present generations. Our past is as much
the face of our present and future. They live in us ... we live
in them." (Starzecka)
With time perceived
as cyclical (instead of linear) you can easily follow the trail of
the past and use it today. This world view was shared with the
Indians of South America:
"... Space and time are a single,
related concept in Runasimi [the
language of the Inca people], represented by one word,
pacha, which can also mean 'world' and
'universe'. The image of time familiar to Waman
Puma was static and spatial: one
could travel in time as one travels over earth - the structure, the
geography, remaining unchanged. To him it does not matter that he
shows Inka Wayna Qhapaq,
who died in 1525, talking to Spaniard, who did not arrive until
1532. Wayna Qhapaq was the last
Inca to rule an undivided empire: he is therefore the archetype, and
it must be he who asks the Spaniards. 'Do you eat gold?'
In Andean thought both world and
time were divided into four sectors or directions unified under a
presiding fifth principle. The Tawantinsuyu - 'the
indivisible four quarters' - was unified and presided over by Cusco,
the center. Similarly, history was divided into four previous ages,
presided over by a fifth, the present.
In
his book, Waman Puma
organizes the history of both Old and New worlds according to this
scheme. The Old Testament and the pre-Inca times are each divided
into four equivalent and parallel ages. The 'present' age in Peru
begins with the appearance of Manku
Qhapaq, the first Inca, a being of
supernatural origin. And in the Old World the 'present' starts with
the birth of Jesus Christ." (The Two Worlds of Peru)
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You cannot see the
future because the organ of viewing is helpless in the night. The
future is a dimension of time and therefore you need the Moon.
When the glyphs in
the rongorongo texts and on the canopy of the Dendera round
zodiac have their 'faces' in the direction of the rising Sun it
means the future cannot be seen - it lies to the left, at the back
side. You have your eyes in front, not at the back.
This is not hard go
grasp. But the real mystery has not been explained: Why are the
signs marching forward, at least according to some of the events described
sequentially by them, against the rising Sun? Or is it just an illusion
created by how their faces are oriented? Let us look at a mirror
version of the zodiac:
Now the sequence of
events described by Khnum and his wives appear as they
should, they arrive clockwise and they also look forward in time. But for
instance Orion, Taurus, Ram and Pisces arrive in the wrong order. Maybe
time moves in two different directions in the zodiac. Or maybe we
have misread the story of Khnum with his wives.
Neither alternative
appears very attractive.
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There may be clues
in Manuscript E. We remember the 4 sons of the Sun king and how they
were allotted the 4 quarters of the island (cfr at pure).
The youngest of them
got the eastern side and the land of the oldest son was in the northern
quadrant:
...
The quarternary system,
which divides the island into four quadrants, correlates the four
royal sons with the path of the sun ... The sequence of the sons is
determined by their order of birth. To the first-born goes the
region in which the noon sun reaches its zenith, a striking symbol
for the highest ranking son; to the second-born goes the region of
the setting sun. The name 'Miru' may have been connected to
the central Polynesian concept of a region of the dead to the west
and its guardian. The third son inherits the midnight region, and
the last-born inherits the eastern section.
Since the last-born, a
'good and strong child' (poki rivariva, poki hiohio),
was closest to the father, the region of the rising sun is alotted
to him, which gives this region special value. While the successor
of the king is like 'the sun at its highest point', the youngest son
is like 'the rising sun' ...
To
which can be added that the king himself was in the center, the 5th
'corner' of the island. Waman Puma would have known it
immediately.
The
young sun (son) (Harpokrates) is the one who sucks the finger:
... The bereaved and sorrowing Isis, meanwhile,
wandering over the world in her quest - like Demeter in search
of the lost Persephone - came to Byblos, where she learned of
the wonderful tree. And, placing herself by a well of the city,
in mourning, veiled and in humble guise - again like Demeter -
she spoke to none until there approached the well the
handmaidens of the queen, whom she greeted kindly. Braiding
their hair, she breathed upon them such a wondrous perfume that
when they returned and Astarte saw and smelt the braids she sent
for the stranger, took her into the house, and made her the
nurse of her child. The great goddess gave the infant her finger
instead of breast to suck and at night, having placed him in a
fire to burn away all that was mortal, flew in the form of a
swallow around the pillar, mournfully chirping. But the child's
mother, Queen Astarte, happening in upon this scene, shrieked
when she spied her little son resting in the flames and thereby
deprived him of the priceless boon ...
The
priceless boon was immortality, delivered by the finger of Isis given to
the child in the night. The story is about mortality, which is the domain of
the Moon. She determines the pattern of Life and Death. Waxing comes before waning and in between is
the bloom of life. At the end there is only darkness. Likewise in
the beginning.
The
firstborn son of the king, Tuu Maheke, will become old
earlier than the rest of them. Number 1 in the sequence will therefore be
allotted the 4th quadrant, number 2 in birth order (Miru Te Mata
Nui) will go to the 3rd quadrant, number 3 (Tuu Rano Kao)
to the 2nd, and the lastborn (Te Mata O Tuu Hotu Iti) to the
first quadrant. The order of birth is the reverse of the order of
quadrants. To move from the 4th quadrant to the 1st, by way of the
3rd and 2nd quadrant, you will move towards the future. In time the
youngest will be the oldest.
Dimly
I perceive the finger of Moon. She will surely like the baby more
than the old one. She will move towards him. The events must move
her in that direction. |
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