TRANSLATIONS

TRANSLATIONS

Next subject is viri:

A few preliminary remarks and imaginations:

1. The Chinese (and Japanes) sign for 5 is said to be based on a picture of a thread-reel:

(Ref.: Henshall)

The year can be regarded as having 5 parts - the regular 4 quarters and an extra 'dark' period outside the calendar before next year can begin. The last period can then be associated with the fingers on a hand (rima).

On Easter Island, where the major structure of the year probably was two half-years, two 'thread-reels' were presumably needed, one at the end of the 1st half-year and another at the end of the 2nd half year.

When a thread is rolled up around an object it disappears. It is made invisible and therefore 'detronised'. Same thing with periods of time, they must be made to disappear.

When Bishop Jaussen on Tahiti received his first rongorongo tablet (Échancrée) it had been made harmless by being wrapped in a '16m-long skein of braided human hair'. Probably it was hair from women, whose hair is extra potent. (Cfr how Maui used the tresses of his sister Hina to make a rope whose mana could not be destroyed by Ra.)

Individual segments of time are in many respects similar to other objects:

"... before there was a world (what we would call the 'universe'), a solitary deified tree was at the center of all there was. As the world's creation approached, this deity became pregnant with potential life; its branches grew one of all things in the form of fruit.

Not only were there gross physical objects like rocks, maize, and deer hanging from the branches, there were also such elements as types of lightning, and even individual segments of time.

Eventually this abundance became too much for the tree to support, and the fruit fell. Smashing open, the fruit scattered their seeds; and soon there were numerous seedlings at the foot of the old tree.

The great tree provided shelter for the young 'plants', nurturing them, until finally it was crowded out be the new.

Since then, this tree has existed as a stump at the center of the world. This is what remains of the original 'Father/Mother' (Ti Tie Ti Tixel), the source and endpoint of life ... " (Maya Cosmos)

The rongorongo tablets were probably very tapu in ancient times, and in order to be able to send Échancrée to Bishop Jaussen it must first be made noa:

"Balancing the notion of tapu, though not in perfect dichotomy, is the notion of noa. This pertains to mundane, ordinary objects and functions - household and serving utensils, the acts of preparing and eating food, the many small and common interactions of everyday life.

Noa is safe - without preternatural sanction or restricted association, it is demonstrated by the lifting of the condition of tapu from a particular environment or object. A newly built house, ornamented and fresh, would be considered tapu - unsafe, prohibited, raw with spirit and inaccessible to the common touch of people. Making the place noa - 'blessing' it in current terms - would involve ritual, and the crossing of the threshold, usually by a high-born woman.

Her special form of tapu would counter the energies within the house, and thus render it noa, and safe for general entry. Such ritual continues to be observed today; even in the context of an ethnological or fine arts exhibition, these procedures are followed, to appease the ancestral forces who may generate tapu, which imbues the objects with dread or beauty." (Starzecka)

A citation from Maya Cosmos is in place here:

"When the Maya wished to rebuild or expand on a particular site, they did not raze the existing structure to the ground. They ritually 'terminated' the building, defacing or knocking down sculptures on it, to release the power that had built up over its long use as a portal to the Otherworld.

Then they would build the next phase of construction over that one, perhaps incorporating parts of the old structure into their new design, most likely burying the old under a much larger and more elaborate edifice.

It should be understood that a temple was not so much stripped of its power when terminated as 'put on hold'. Buildings that had served as portals to the Otherworld for centuries were considered very powerful doorways. Through constant use, the membrane between the worlds had become very thin.

Of course, when a center was finally abandoned, due to war, ecological disaster, or other happenstance, all the temples were permanently terminated. Leaving them in operation, would not only have been disrespectful to the supernatural beings and gods, but absolutely dangerous, akin to leaving an untended, active nuclear reactor lying around for anyone to wander into."

We can now better understand why the statues on Easter Island were overturned.

Mother earth, Papa-tu'a-nuku, was turned on her face too. Probably this is a memory from a time when sun rule was enforced upon an earlier moon system (moon and earth being nearly identical).

Old buildings grew more and more powerful among the Maya. In Polynesia new buildings had 'raw' power and must be ritually 'born' into the light of the human sphere, which of course necessitated women.

2. The shape of viri maybe illustrates how the 'eyes' representing two past segments of time no longer are present. Only 'empty eye-sockets' are left:

The glyph should then be imagined turned 90º to the right, i.e. in the opposite direction compared with Rei glyphs. Probably Rei glyphs are male in character while viri are female.

The eyes are intimately connected with light, they are organs which in a way create light:

"Fig. 2, taken from the Madrid Codex, a Maya document written shortly before the conquest, reflects the central role of astronomy among the civilizations of Mesoamerica. It shows an astonomer observing the stars. Seated in his station, he seems to be plucking them out of the sky with his extended eyes. The skywatcher is surrounded by hieroglyphs and Maya numbers which presumably relate to his astronomical secrets." (Skywatchers)

Without eyes you are blind, as if in total darkness.

"On the late afternoon of the June solstice, towards sunset, we reached Ahu Akivi near the centre of the western side of Easter Island. This is an inland site, 3 kilometers from the coast. Like Ahu Nau Nau at Anakena, it has seven Moai, but in this case none of them have topknots and, uniquely, all face west towards the sea - which is clearly visible from the high point on which they stand.

There is a curious tradition concerning these grizzled, otherworldly statues, solemn and powerful, with their blank, aloof eye-sockets gazing out over the limitless ocean. Like most of the other Moai of Easter Island the local belief is that they died, long ago, at the time when mana - magic - supposedly fled from the island never to return.

However, in common with only a very few of the other Moai, it is believed that these particular statues still have the power, twice a year, to transform themselves into aringa ora - literally 'living faces' - a concept startingly similar to the ancient Egyptian notion that statues became 'living images' (sheshep ankh) after undergoing the ceremony of the 'opening of the mouth and the eyes'. Statues at Angkor were likewise considered to be lifeless until their eyes had been symbolically 'opened'.

The great stone Moai of Easter Island were at one time equipped with beautiful inlaid eyes of white coral and red scoria. In a number of cases - though not at Ahu Akivi - sufficient fragments have been found to make restoration possible, showing that the figures originally gazed up at an angle towards the sky. It is therefore easy to guess why this island was once called Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, 'Eyes Looking at Heaven'.

On a moonlit night its hundreds of 'living' statues scanning the stars with glowing coral eyes would have seemed like mythic astonomers peering into the cosmos. And in the heat of the day those same eyes would have tracked the path of the sun, which the ancient Egyptians called the 'Path of Horus' or the 'Path of Ra'. This was also the 'path' pursued by the Akhu Shemsu Hor, the 'Followers of Horus', for whom the exclamation Ankh'Hor - 'the god Horus Lives' - would have been an everyday usage.

The principal astronomical alignments of the great temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia are towards sunrise on the December solstice and sunrise on the March equinox - respectively midwinter and the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. The two moments in the year when Easter Island traditions say that the Moai of Ahu Akivi come alive and are 'particularly meaningful' are the June solstice and the September equinox - respectively midwinter and the beginning of spring in these southern latitudes.

Rigorous archaeoastronomical studies by William Mulloy, William Liller, Edmundo Edwards, Malcolm Clark and others have confirmed that the east façade of Ahu Akivi does have a very definite equinoctial orientation and, indeed, that 'the complex was designed to mark the time of the equinoxes'." (Hancock 3)

3. Viri glyphs resemble ua glyphs, not only in shape but also in meaning:


ua	viri

Both are signifying the arriving 'darkness' of the ruling season, both are female in character, and both should be imagined turned 90º to the right.

According to how ua is located in the calendars of K and E - as the last glyph of 'summer' - also viri ought to be positioned as the last glyph of a ruling season. Cfr the earlier text:

"The ua glyph type seems to be associated with the arrival of the season when sun no longer is high in the sky. In the K calendar, for instance, the only ua glyph is the last glyph in what probably was regarded as the summer half of the year:

Ka1-1--Ka1-24	24
Ka2-1--Ka2-10	10
Ka2-11--Kb3-5 (ua)	108
*Kb3-6--Kb5-20**	50
sum	192

108 glyphs for summer was chosen because the winter half of the year then would have 24 + 10 + 50 = 84 glyphs. A balance between the two halves of the year can therefore be expressed by 6 * 18 (summer) and 6 * 14 (winter).

18 is a natural choice for summer, a short expression for 180 days, and 14 will be the corresponding expression for a fortnight when moon stands high in the sky.

The parallel ua glyph in E is located 3 * 18 = 54 glyphs from the middle of the calendar, but then follows only 21 glyphs up to the end. Instead of 192 this E calendar has a total of 150 glyphs. Instead of 108 + 84 the pattern is 108 + 42 (half 84). Instead of 18 and 14 there is 18 and 7. But also in E ua is positioned as the end of the 3rd quarter."