Pa5-35 Pa5-36 Pa5-37 Pa5-38

These four glyphs describe the 2nd period. In Pa5-35 the sun is eating so he will grow bigger and in Pa5-36 we are informed that he has escaped from the underworld.

However, another equally valid interpretation is to connect this glyph with the idea that darkness is retreating ('fleeing night').

"For the Marquesas are given: - daybreak, twilight, dawn, ('the day or the red sky, the fleeing night'), broad day - bright day from full morning to about ten o'clock -, noon ('belly of the sun'), afternoon ('back part of the sun'), evening ('fire-fire', the same expression as in Hawaii, i.e. the time to light the fires on the mountains or the kitchen fire for supper)." (Nilsson)

Pa5-37 gives us two periods and in Pa5-38 we once again are reminded that the text is about the 'calendar' of the day.

In Pa5-35 the top center of the 6 flames of the sun is converted into a 'person' eating. This 'person' is not human and I will call him a 'sun-cat' (just a mnemonic help).

"The supreme god Makemake was also carved at Orongo as a feline figure. Thomson thus said of some Orongo rock carvings which he estimated to antedate all others: 'the most common figure is a mythical animal, half human in form, with bowed back and long claw-like legs and arms. According to the natives this symbol was intended to represent the god Meke-Meke... ' He claimed it bore a 'striking resemblance' to a form he had seen in Peruvian art.

A feline figure with arched back, drawn-up abdomen, tall legs, and a round head with gaping mouth is commonly found incised with bird-men on the Easter Island tablets. Bishop T. Jaussen's much quoted theory that this animal is a 'rat' is as farfetched as at all possible and solely dictated by the fact that rats were the only animals on Easter Island and, what is more, feline animals do not exist on any Pacific island.

Yet felines were present in America and dominated the religious and symbolic art all the way from Mexico to Peru since Tiahuanaco times, and, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, consistently as a symbol of the creator god." (Heyerdahl 2)

One of the small riddles regarding Metoro is why he chose the word kiore (rat) when telling Jaussen what this type of glyph meant. Didn't he know the word for cat? Did he purposefully chose the opposite of cat, trying to get the bishop to think in the right direction; the bishop didn't know the Rapanui language. Or did Metoro try to mislead him? Neither, I guess. Instead I bet that kiore is a faint echo of león or some other word meaning lion. For solar worshipers there must be some animal which could be called lion. A similar process has named the little lizard moko.

"Now the god of that temple was of a type known in Hawaiian as the mo'o: which is a word meaning 'lizard', or 'reptile'. But the only reptile in Hawaii is a harmless, even affectionately regarded little lizard that scurries up and down the walls of people's houses and clings like a fly to ceilings, trapping insects with its quick tongue. 

The manner in which the mythological system of the islands has magnified this innocuous creature to the proportions of a greatly dangerous divine dragon supplies one of the most graphic illustrations I know of a mythological process - seldom mentioned in the textbooks of our subject but of considerable force and importance nevertheless - to which the late Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy referred as land-náma, 'land naming' or 'land taking'. 

Through land-náma, 'land-naming', or 'land taking', the features of a newly entered land are assimilated by an immigrant people to its imported heritage of myth. We have already noted the case of the role of the serpent assumed by the eel. We are now considering that of the same serpent role assumed by a harmless lizard." (Campbell)

The head of the sun-cat represents the sun and the gaping mouth might possibly mean a sector of the circle of time. The gaping mouth is always there, not only while the 'cat' is eating.

Another, more reasonable, interpretation of the gaping mouth is that Time consumes us all (like rats). In Greek mythology Chronos devours his children.

The hand towards the mouth shows only three fingers, and that is because what the sun is eating must be light rays. How else could he give them away later? Nothing comes into being from nothing. The sun refuels on top.

There must be a circular motion for the sun. He gives us light and warmth and therefore we must give him in kind. We do that by lighting fires towards the east in the morning so he will be nourished and well fed. That we tell our children to make them understand the importance of this rite. (But we experts understand that sun needs more powerful recharges.)

The sun also refuels water (otherwise how could he deliver rain?), and that refueling he must do in the night, deep down in the great pool of the underworld. All water sooner or later flows towards that pool.

We cannot see the arched back of the sun-cat. Instead the elbow serves as a sign for haga (bend).

The arch or bend informs us about change, here clearly increase. Therefore the current henua in reality is not straight but bent. The elbow serves as a sort of qualifier for the abstraction pictured in the double henua glyph (Pa5-37).

But the sign haga also has a more grim aspect, here because this is the 1st period of daylight. There is a potentially dangerous change of state here, from darkness to light. All changes of state are risky, uncertain because there is uncertainty about which state rules.

In Pa5-36 there is a henua with two holes, whereof the one on top is open, an indication that the 'door' to the dark underworld has opened to let the sun out.

"Their mothers have told them that the sky is a big bowl whose edge is fitted together with the horizon except on those places where the sun goes up and down. Through these two holes ships from another world can enter into our world." (Nordhoff & Hall)

There are two holes in this type of glyph and these holes are circular like the sun, 'doors' shaped for him. The 'door' at the bottom of the glyph, through which sun entered the underworld last evening, is closed. Time grows upwards in the system of rongorongo writing, which means that the closed 'door' at the bottom represents the evening 'door' of yesterday. At least that is what we tell the women and children.

But spatially seen the sun has now emerged from his temporary stay in the world below the horizon, the underworld seen from us. The people living on the other side of the eastern horizon have seen the sun before we now are seeing him. And now that we see him, those on the exact opposite point of the earth (the antipodes) cannot; for them the sun is not out. In the glyph we can see that down below he is inside, not out.

In Pa5-37 there are two henua close together, the two parts of this the 2nd period.

As this period can be divided in two depending on whether we the sun is freed from the horizon or not, that could be the two periods described. (The system of writing rongorongo is not standardized but open to individual creativity.)

Because of the difficulty in defining exactly when the sun is up, we do not count hours yet. That we will start with at the beginning of next period, the 3rd.

Another consequence of the difficulty in deciding exactly when the sun is born is that we cannot determine through measurements anything about this the 2nd period of the day when sun enters the stage. The two henua should be written exactly alike because we have no more information than that there are two parts.

With Pa5-38 we find the last glyph of the 2nd period, a tapa mea.This glyph has 7 marks, the corresponding glyph in the first period (Pa5-34) has 9. Nine means the underworld, seven this world of ours in light and darkness. It is certainly no coincidence that there are 7 marks in Pa5-38, now when the sun has come to us. At the end of this the 2nd period he is fine and growing, exactly as in the rest of the periods until noon; 7 marks now and 7 marks in all the periods until noon.

9 + 7 = 16 = 4 * 4, which e.g. could be seen as the quarters of four years. After that there will come a special year with one more day than the usual 365 days.

"An iconographic study by Jeff Kowalski suggests a cosmological layout for the Nunnery. The higher placement of the North Building, with its 13 exterior doorways (reflecting the 13 layers of heaven), and the celestial serpents surmounting the huts identify it with the celestial sphere.

The iconography of the West Building, with 7 exterior doorways (7 is the mystic number of the earth's surface), and figures of Pawahtun - the earth god as a turtle - indicate this to be the Middleworld, the place of the sun's descent into the Underworld. 

The East Building has mosaic elements reflecting the old war cult of Teotihuacan, where tradition had it that the sun was born; thus, this may also be Middleworld, the place of the rising sun. Finally, the South Building has 9 exterior doorways (the Underworld or Xibalba had 9 layers), and has the lowest placement in the compex; it thus seems to be associated with death and the nether regions." (The Maya)