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TRANSLATIONS
We move on to tapa mea
in the glyph dictionary:
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A few preliminary
remarks and imaginations:
1.
The glyph chosen to illustrate the tapa mea glyph
type comes from Tahua,
from the 'calendar of the daylight'. Three short upward marks and three
short downward marks tell us that sun is involved (6 is his number).
The sun goes upwards before noon and then downwards. The marks are
probably 'feathers', a way of showing
the colour red.
"There seems to have been
a little difficulty at first in getting the machinery of the
sky into smooth running order, for some maintain that Ruddy
Sun and Waxing Moon disputed in a brotherly fashion. The Sun desired the Moon
to accompany him and suggested they travel in daylight,
while the Moon insisted they make their rounds during the
night. So they agreed, not too amicably, to separate, the
Moon saying pettishly, 'Very well! You go by day and have
the servile job of drying women's washings!' And the Sun retorted, 'And
you go by night and be terrified by
food-ovens!'
The quarrel must have been made up later, for the Moon
visits the Sun for a day or two each month."
(Makemson)
The word for red
(mea)
is the same as that for 'gills', not very strange
because gills are red. In Gb3-9 there if a variant of
tapa mea
which perhaps illustrates the open red gap of some creature:
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Gb3-9 |
The ordinal number of the glyph (counted from
Gb8-30) is 300. Once there were only 10 months for the sun.
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Aa1-45 was defined as fenua
by Metoro. At Aa1-43 he did not say henua, but we know the
glyph type mostly was called henua. Possibly we should read the
glyphs pairwise:
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land |
|
Aa1-42 |
Aa1-43 |
| e ia
toa tauuruuru raaraa |
 |
 |
sea |
|
Aa1-44 |
Aa1-45 |
| e ia
toa tauuru - i te fenua |
The canoe is the little
land on the sea, which will develop into the great spring land later
on. Like the Ark of Noah it contains everything, in short:
From the old tauuru
sun, sky, and land emerge. The main vehicles of the night are toa
glyphs, Aa1-43 and Aa1-45 are only added comments. There are 10
toa glyphs during the night, according to Tahua.
If these 10 toa glyphs correspond to stars, ana, then the
last three could be Ana-mua, Ana-muri, and Ana-roto:
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1 |
Ana-mua, entrance pillar |
Antares, α Scorpii |
-26° 19' 16h 26 |
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2 |
Ana-muri, rear pillar (at the foot of which was the
place for tattooing) |
Aldebaran, α Tauri |
16° 25' 04h 33 |
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3 |
Ana-roto,
middle pillar |
Spica, α Virginis |
-10° 54' 13h 23 |
Beyond Hatinga Te Kohe
comes Roto Iri Are. Next
pages:
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3. Maybe
the eye of the sun
is what we should see in tapa mea glyphs. The Egyptians used
similar symbols (ref. Wilkinson), and numbers 22-23 below look like tapa mea:
The lines below can be interpreted as light rays,
but another possibility is streams of 'tears' (i.e. rain):
The picture comes from Orongo (Heyerdahl 4).
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4.
The red
cloth (tapa mea) of the sun probably should be contrasted
with the 'black cloth' of night. The day is the time for living,
the night the time of death. The eye is quickly moving, but during
the night you are still and sleeping.
Red is the colour of life, as seen in the morning when the newborn
sun is colouring the sky, or - the other side of the coin - when he
as an old man dies in blood at the western horizon in the evening.
The stuff of life is 'water', without water you will die. Light and
water apparently must be close in kind. Sun delivers both sun beams
and refreshing rain. When the sun child during a.m. is feeding
himself (it is his own arm), it presumably means that he is 'eating'
(kai) the water vapour created from his heat:
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Ha5-52 |
The close of the cycle comes when sun - as a last act
before he is 'going to sleep' - is releasing in form
of rain (ûa) what he has taken in:
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ua |
Aa6-66 |
Ua has a double set of three 'fingers' - of the same kind as
the single set used in kai.
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"... the sacred
kings and priests in Polynesia were not allowed to touch food with their
hands, and had therefore to be fed by others ..." (The Golden Bough)
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