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TRANSLATIONS
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Te Pei
In Barthel 2 the pe'i fish has been compared with the
Maori word pei, 'to drive out, banish'. It is a 'tasty fish' caught
in 'deep waters'. Possibly it has been driven there from a higher
position, because the time is high summer - from a top position a quick dive to the lowest. What has happened can
be imagined as a pei-âmo ride.
Pei = 'Grooves,
still visible on the steep slopes of some hills, anciently used as
toboggans. People used to slide down them seated on banana-tree
barks. This pastime, very popular, was called pei-âmo.'
Sun has matured into
a grown man and been initiated into the mysteries of life. He has been
reborn in the process and now moves on by following the moon. The connection with
Rano Kau is evident and Te Pei
is the natural development following after Te Poko Uri ('the
dark abyss') - while Nga Kope Ririva is a 'zero', an interlude.
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Ga8-17
(221) |
Ga8-18 |
Ga8-19 |
Ga8-20 |
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Haú
in Ga8-23 has 5 'feathers' at left, i.e. 5 ('fire')
stations of spring sun are in the past. |
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Ga8-21 |
Ga8-22 |
Ga8-23 |
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Ga8-24
(228) |
Ga8-25 |
Ga8-26 |
Gb1-1 |
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Gb1-2
(232) |
Gb1-3 |
Gb1-4 |
Gb1-5 |
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Gb1-6
(236) |
Gb1-7 |
Gb1-8 |
Gb1-9 |
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Gb1-10
(240) |
Gb1-11 |
Gb1-12 |
Gb1-13 |
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Gb1-14
(244) |
Gb1-15 |
Gb1-16 |
Gb1-17 |
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Gb1-18
(248) |
Gb1-19 |
Gb1-20 |
Gb1-21 |
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Gb1-22
(252) |
Gb1-23 |
Gb1-24 |
Gb1-25 |
The 5 'fire'
(spring sun) stations (months) in the past (cfr Ca8-23)
presumably are Te Piringa Aniva, Te Kioe
Uri, Te Manavai, Te Poko Uri, and Te Pu
Mahore. The glyph type haú usually indicates
where a season ends. Therefore the 4 glyphs following each
measure (8 * 29.5 = 236 etc) apparently belong to
respectively redmarked 'measure' glyph above in the table.
248 * 2 = 496 (=
16 * 31) probably is the highest such 'measure'. Gb1-22
(with 22 probably alluding to π) does not
belong to the group of 6 * 4 = 24 glyphs connected with
Te Pei. The extraordinary Gb1-21 is the last glyph.
The group of 4
glyphs beginning with Gb8-24 straddles the border between
side a and side b. 8 * 24 = 192, a number equal to the
number of glyphs in the K text (which covers only the 'dark',
uri, side). 228 = 8 * 28½, is possibly indicating the
border line between those 28 nights when moon is being illuminated
by sun and the following dark 29th night.
With 8 * 29 =
232 a 'new moon time' has arrived and the 'head' has gone.
The empty 'eye socket' (where the sun disc should have been)
is illustrated like a navel in the following Gb1-3, as if in
expectation of the new sun child to arrive.
The bird with
undulating wings in Gb1-4 stands at position 13 * 18 = 234.
Together with the following tagata it marks the end
of the old season. At bottom right (in Gb1-5) there is a
sign like an apex, the sun maximum is arriving.
The turnover is
illustrated in Gb1-6--7 (from 6, sun, to 7, moon). 236 = 472
/ 2, i.e. Gb1-6 is the last of the sun glyphs. The head of
the sun comes off (hore) and it becomes dark.
| Hore
(Hore, horehore): to
cut with a knife or with an obsidian blade (also:
horea). Horeko, solitary,
lonely; kona horeko, solitary place,
loneliness. Vanaga.
To hew, to cut off, to amputate,
to castrate, to cut with a knife, to decapitate, to
abridge, to incise, to set landmarks; a notch,
incision, tenon; hore poto, to cut short off;
hore te gao, to chop the head off. Churchill. |
In sun 'measure'
the same message is told in Gb1-10 (with ordinal number 8 *
30 = 240 instead of 8 * 29.5 = 236). The head is still there
at left but at right it has gone.
In Gb1-13 spring sun (the 'eater')
is inverted, with vae at left - he has gone down. The
following glyph (244 = 8 * 30½) initiates the new sun
season. Hua
poporo lies ahead, the 'fruits' of the conjunction
between spring sun and earth.
Not
until 8 * 31 (day 248) is 'noon' assuredly reached
(according to the longest measure, based on 31). It ends
with the exceptional Gb1-21 (at 252 = 7 * 36).
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Rano Kau
My argument can begin
with the intensified version of kau, viz. kaukau:
| Kaukau
1. Horizontal poles of a frame
(of a hare paega, or a paina
statue): he-hakatu'u te tama o te paina,
he-kaukau, they erect the vertical poles of
the paina then they lay upon them the
horizontal ones. 2. Group of people: e-tahi
tuitui reipá i Te Pei, ekó rava'a e-varu kaukau;
i-garo ai i Hiva, i te kaiga, a necklace of
mother-of-pearl is on te Pei, few will
find it (lit: eight groups of people); it has
remained in Hiva, in our homeland. 3. To
go through, to pass through in unison;
he-hogi-mai te ûka i te e'eo o te pua kaukau-á i
roto ite hare, the girl smelt the fragrance
of the pua wafting inside the house. 4.
Newborn baby's first hand and feet movements (kaukau
or kau). The five stages of a
baby's development are: kaukau, puepe,
tahuri, totoro, mahaga. Puepue = said
of a newborn baby when, a few weeks old, it
begins to distinguish people and objects:
ku-puepue-á te poki. Tahuri = of a
new-born baby, to move from side to side:
ku-tahuri-á te poki. Totoro = to
crawl; ki totoro te poki, when the baby
crawls. Mahaga = baby when able to stand
by itself. Vanaga. |
The sun
is changing, is being newborn, at a solstice. The first
stage of a newborn baby is kaukau. He has gone
through (kaukau) an initiation rite. People have
assembled for the occasion and 'a necklace of
mother-of-pearl' is on Te Pei. But few ('8 groups
of people') will find it:
e-tahi
tuitui reipá i Te Pei, ekó rava'a e-varu kaukau; garo ai
i Hiva, i te kaiga
8 is a
zero-number, the cycle of counting has reached to the
beginning again. Sun is reborn as a child, he has found
his 'mother-of-pearl'.
Sun has
stopped his climbing, he has reached climax. Summer
solstice is flat and horizontal. Kaukau are the
horizontal poles of a frame:
he-hakatu'u te tama o te paina, he-kaukau
'they
erect the vertical poles of the paina then they
lay upon them the horizontal ones'.
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PAINA
"Although the Easter
Islanders still cautiously kept all their
small stone and wood carvings in hiding,
they did reveal their own artistic talent
and activity by carrying forth colossal
paina figures in the presence of the
Spaniards [1770]. These were skilfully made
light-weight dolls of superhuman size,
fashioned from painted bark-cloth stuffed
with branches, grass, and reeds.
They were carried in
processions and erected at the side of old
image platforms, as if they represented some
substitute for the giant stone men of the
Middle Period that this historic or Late
Period population was unable to carve or
erect.
Agüera (Ibid., p.
95) gave the following account of the
paina figures, after a description of
the ancient stone statues of which an
unspecified number were still standing on
ahu:
'They have another effigy
or idol clothed and portable which is about
four yards in length: it is properly
speaking the figure of a Judas, stuffed with
straw or dried grass. It has arms and legs,
and the head has coarsely figured eyes,
nostrils, and mouth: it is adorned with a
black fringe of hair made of rushes, which
hangs half-way down the back. On certain
days they carry this idol to the place where
they gather together, and judging by the
demonstrations some of them made, we
understood it to be the one dedicated to
enjoyment..." (Heyerdahl 3)
"Der Cultus bestand in
Anrufung der Götter, deren Willen der
Priester erklärte, in Opfern an
Lebensmitteln, auch an Menschen, und in der
Feier gewisser, zu bestimmten Zeiten
wiederkehrender Feste (rakauti), von
denen das erste im Früjahr 2 Monate dauerte,
das zweite im Sommer mit der Errichtung
einer Pyramide aus Zweigen (paina)
endete, das dritte in den Winter fiel; bei
allen fanden Tänze, Gesänge, Spiele aller
Art statt." (Churchill: From 'Die Inseln des
stillen Oceans' by Carl E. Meinicke; zweiter
Theil, 1876, p. 228.) |
We
ourselves gather and dance ('zu bestimmten Zeiten')
- around the Christmans Tree at the darkest of times
and around the Maypole when the sky roof is high.
The
simple word kau:
| Kau
1. To move one's feet
(walking or swimming); ana oho koe,
ana kau i te va'e, ka rava a me'e mo
kai, if you go and move your feet,
you'll get something to eat; kakau
(or also kaukau), move
yourself swimming. 2. To spread (of
plants): ku-kau-áte kumara, the
sweet potatoes have spread, have grown a
lot. 3. To swarm, to mill around (of
people): ku-kau-á te gagata i mu'a i
tou hare, there's a crowd of people
milling about in front of your house. 4.
To flood (of water after the rain):
ku-kau-á te vai haho, the water has
flooded out (of a container such as a
taheta). 5. To increase, to
multiply: ku-kau-á te moa, the
chickens have multiplied. 6. Wide,
large: Rano Kau, 'Wide Crater'
(name of the volcano in the southwest
corner of the island). 7. Expression of
admiration: kau-ké-ké! how big!
hare kau-kéké! what a big house!
tagata hakari kau-kéké! what a
stout man! Vanaga.
To bathe, to swim;
hakakau, to make to swim. P Pau.,
Mgv., Mq.: kau, to swim. Ta.:
áu, id. Kauhaga, swimming.
Churchill.
The stem kau does not appear
independently in any language of
Polynesian proper. For tree and for
timber we have the
composite
lakau in various stages of
transformation. But kau will also
be found
as an initial component of various tree
names. It is in Viti that we first find
it in free existence. In Melanesia this
form is rare. It occurs as kau in
Efaté, Sesake, Epi, Nguna, and perhaps
may be preserved in Aneityum; as gau
in Marina; as au in Motu and
somewhere in the Solomon islands. The
triplicity of the Efaté forms [kasu,
kas, kau] suggests a
possible transition. Kasu and
kas are easy to be correlated,
kasu and kau less easy. They
might be linked by the assumption of a
parent form kahu, from which each
might derive. This would appear in
modern Samoan as kau; but I have
found it the rule that even the mildest
aspirate in Proto-Samoan becoming
extinct in modern Samoan is yet retained
as aspiration in Nuclear Polynesia and
as th in Viti, none of which
mutations is found on this record.
Churchill 2. |
To
move seems to be a basic meaning. Of course, at
solstice sun must be induced to move, and a crowd of
people milling around should be the proper magic
means by which to induce the great mill of the sky
roof to move again. It is not the sun which has
stopped, it is the sky roof which has stuck.
The
cosmic tree (rakau), stretching between the
poles, has stopped revolving.
Movement is necessary for life. There will be no
growth if nothing moves.
Rakau
was according to Englert the name of the 13th night
(immediately before full moon, Omotohi).
According to Métraux it was the name of the 17th
night and he had Omotohi as number 18. The
culmination is reached at 14 or 18 depending on
whether you look at it from the female (14) or male
(18) perspective.
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The 'flat earth' is the time when
activity ceases, when time is ebbing out. This fact probably is what makes
myth talk about another time scale for the gods. It moves so slow that we
cannot notice it. Rip van Winkle, when he returned, found life had run much
faster among the mortals than among the gods.
... After encountering
strangely dressed men, rumored to be the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew, who
are playing nine-pins, and after drinking some of their liquor, he settles
down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up twenty years later and
returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is
dead and his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He
immediately gets into trouble when he hails himself a loyal subject of King
George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has
taken place. An old local recognizes him, however, and Rip's now grown
daughter eventually puts him up ...
There are two solstices, the same
phenomenon happens both in high summer and in low winter. There are two seasons in the year, and
when they grow old they do not move any more. They must be 'liquidated' -
toppled and put back into circulation again. They should be pushed down into
the sea. Hamlet's Mill:
"Vainamoinen driving with his copper boat into the 'maw of the Maelstrom' is
said to sail to 'the depths of the sea', to the 'lowest bowels of the
earth', to the 'lowest regions of the heavens'. Earth and heaven - a
significant contraposition. As concerns the whereabouts of the whirlpool,
one reads:
| Before the gates of Pohjola, |
| Below the threshold of color-covered
Pohjola, |
| There the pines roll with their roots, |
| The pines fall crown first into the gullet
of the whirlpool." |
The 'pines' falling crown first into
the 'maw of the whirlpool' are surely very much like what we can read in Gb1-7,
the first day of the 2nd half:
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Gb1-6
(236) |
Gb1-7 |
Gb1-8 |
Gb1-9 |
The following Gb1-8 has high at
left the 'berry' of spring sun, while the one at right, somewhat
lower and evidently more heavy, should be the next sun. The 5 + 6
'feathers at right seem to confirm the reading.
The copper boat of Väinömöinen is Venus, of course. Friday is
the 6th day of the week. Going down Venus should be the guide, she is able
to move around in the dark. According to the Maya there should be a black
quarter following 236 days of 'morning':
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phase |
observed periods |
periods in the Mayan 'map' |
difference |
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morning star |
263 |
236 |
- 27 |
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black |
50 |
90 |
+ 40 |
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evening star |
263 |
250 |
- 13 |
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black |
8 |
8 |
0 |
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sum |
584 |
584 |
0 |
In Gb1-9 'canoes' are at the
back of the vertical string, in Gb1-8 they are in front. The sun head (left
in Gb1-9) has come off when confronting the oval great droplet.
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