-	-
...	...

This is what I call the 'X area', and according to my understanding it is 'ground zero' (0) where everything ends and (hopefully) starts anew, i.e. midwinter solstice.

I decided to call it the X area because it was unknown for me what the glyphs meant. X still means unknown (although I now think I know what the X area means) - because at midwinter solstice it is not known what will happen.

The gods sit in meating in the chamber of hazard (Ubšugina ) and will decide the happenings of next year, while we take a coconut and twirl it around (mimicking the whirling motion of the sky) to see what mood the gods are in.

"Beachte aber, dass der erste Monat des Jahres nach dem Schicksalsgemach (= Ubšugina) bezeichnet wird ... , der siebente aber d.i. der erste der zweiten Jahreshälfte nach dem im Ubšugina befindlichen Duazaga." (Jensen)

"It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year, he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave ... (The White Goddess)

I could perhaps have chosen the name '0 area' instead. That would have been more to the 'point', because 0 means not only 'unknown' but also carries a lot of extra information due to the total scenario of end and beginning.

But X is more easy to grasp for us civilized men (and women). X for us means not only 'unknown' but also to cross over - exactly the ancient meaning. The old year is 'annu(a)llated'. It is like a cosmic game of tic-tac-toe where 0 (the new egg) always must win over X.

I believe Graves when he (in The White Goddess) says: "... the three main characters ['waxing year, 'waning year' and 'the white goddess'] are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasion of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoic visions and delusions ..."

Therefore it is to be expected that both the rongorongo texts and the Polynesian myths should express events from the Theme (as Graves has named the one and only mythic evergreen).

If I am right in interpreting the X area glyphs (both in A, H and P - though without parallel in Q) as the midwinter scene, then not much need to be written down - we all ought to know what will happen and just a few glyphs as hints will be enough.

Originally - a very very long time ago (Japanese: musashi, musashi - oomusashi, 'once upon a time' ) - the fire must have been understood as a symbol for what distinguishes man from the beasts. Not only man can talk, not only man can use his hands, not only man is shrewd, but only man (and the gods) can make fire. Therefore man and gods belong together in one category and the beast in another.

To affirm this the fires must periodically be extinguished and relit again (as also the gods seem to be doing). Even we in our civilized world remember to relit fires - we have fireworks at new year and light outdoor fires (for the gods to see) at other crucial points during the year.

These relighting points of time are symbolized by manu tara, daybreak birds. In Wilkinson this picture is illuminating:

According to Wilkinson the barn swallow (Hurundo rustica) sitting foremost on the sunboat (travelling under the earth) is there to greet the morning sun's reappearance in the east.

In the picture (from Wikipedia) we can see the red patch below the (pointed) beak which may have influenced the Egyptians to chose this bird for greeting the morning sun. Appropriately its back is dark blue as the night sky.

Midwinter solstice is an ominous time and thus omens are to be searched for. In our civilized  global society the religion of democracy is slowly becoming X and the religion of the individual is emerging (0). At new year each one of us therefore must determine our individual futures by making a 'promise' to change the course of events in the coming year.

Each one of us is 'prominent', meaning 'conspicious' (jutting out of the ground like a mountain, mauga). Therefore we must step forward and make promises.

Midwinter is the summit of the mountain in the north (if we live north of the equator). South of the equator midwinter still means the apex, as we can understand from the tale about Ure Honu.

"Another year passed, and a man by the name of Ure Honu went to work in his banana plantation. He went and came to the last part, to the 'head' (i.e., the upper part of the banana plantation), to the end of the banana plantation. The sun was standing just right for Ure Honu to clean out the weeds from the banana plantation.

On the first day he hoed the weeds. That went on all day, and then evening came. Suddenly a rat came from the middle of the banana plantation. Ure Honu saw it and ran after it. But it disappeared and he could not catch it. On the second day of hoeing, the same thing happened with the rat. It ran away, and he could not catch it. On the third day, he reached the 'head' of the bananas and finished the work in the plantation. Again the rat ran away, and Ure Honu followed it.It ran and slipped into the hole of a stone. He poked after it, lifted up the stone, and saw that the skull [of Hotu Matu'a] was (in the hole) of the stone. (The rat was) a spirit of the skull (he kuhane o te puoko). Ure Honu was amazed and said, 'How beautiful you are! In the head of the new bananas is a skull, painted with yellow root and with a strip of barkcloth around it.' ... (Barthel 2)

It might be a coincidence, but we should anyhow notice that Ure Honu worked 3 days before he found the skull. (The X-area of A has 3 glyphs). We should also think about the possibility that Metoro (presumably) alluded to the Ure Honu myth when he said marai at Aa1-14:

'The strange marai at Aa1-14  I belive is a variant of marae, the centrally located cleared and level burial field 'in front' (rae), here of the year.' 'The 3 'pods' in Aa1-14 (though normally 4 in number) may signify the 3 wives of the sun; GD21 (poporo) means darkness etc.'

Possibly we should interpret the X-area (in A) as the last (and ominously extracalendrical) phase of the old year, where the preceding glyphs (Aa1-9--12)

cover the four regular (calendrical) seasons (of Mother Earth).

 4 + 3 = 7 and we remember that Quetzalcoatl was known as the Son of the Lord of the Seven Caves.