[email protected] Voyages of the Magi (3) 1 Contents The Confederacy of the Pacific............................................................................................................2 The hand..........................................................................................................................................3 The feathered halo...........................................................................................................................6 The mien of the trinity.....................................................................................................................9 The tree-men..................................................................................................................................11 The tora-jinn..................................................................................................................................12 The torii-shin..................................................................................................................................14 The door-jinn.................................................................................................................................14 The sea-jinn....................................................................................................................................14 Gong Gong.....................................................................................................................................16 Weir-can.........................................................................................................................................16 The dol hareubang.........................................................................................................................17 Pangu.............................................................................................................................................19 K’uei Hsing....................................................................................................................................19 Kuan...............................................................................................................................................20 Monkeys as grooms.......................................................................................................................20 Dangun...........................................................................................................................................21 The Ainu & the bear goddess.........................................................................................................22 The Basques’ forebears..................................................................................................................22 The Uru..........................................................................................................................................23 [email protected] Voyages of the Magi (3) 2 The Confederacy of the Pacific The distribution of a single gene variant such as HLA-A may tell us only part of the tale, since some genes are naturally selected by some environments and others by others, so here is a more recent map (2016), including South America, from the Harvard Medical School. The gene reaches westward from South America and east Asia to the Indus valley, tallying in its extent with the likelihood of reversal of the east-west axis of the zodiac, as shown by the direction of heeling. This makes it even likelier that denisovans reached southeast Asia from the west coast of South America. The tug of war between the asuras and devas about the direction of the sea’s circulation likewise implies that they reached South America from the south. ‘The genome-wide data … show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans.’1 In other words some genes in southeast Asia and parts of South America are akin, but there are few genetic traces of a land route leading down from the Bering Straits, across Middle America to the Amazon rain forest. The same is even plainer on the map below. 1 Skoglund, P. et al. Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas. Letter, Nature 525, 03 Sep 2015, p. 104-108 [email protected] Voyages of the Magi (3) 3 Since there is likewise a gap between Africa and southeast Asia in the spread of the dragon motif, the simple explanation seems to be that long distance travel was easier by raft than on foot, so seadogs traveled from Africa to Antarctica and from there to southeast Asia or South America. The dark red spot in South America stands for the Surui Indians near Rondônia, which till recently was covered by 200,000 sq km of rainforest, more than a third of which has now been stripped by outsiders’ logging.2 When a 2,000 mile-long highway was built across their land in 1969, nearly 90% of them died from disease in the following years. In such a context, survival of the fit is a very limited notion, casting no light on general abilities. The distance from the tip of Africa to the Antarctic is about 4500 kilometers, so the Tangaroa, a raft used in crossing the Pacific in 2011 at a speed of about 100 kilometers a day could have reached Antarctica in about 45 days. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist is taken by the seafarer Urshanabi to visit Uta-napišti, who has survived the great flood by sailing with his wife to a faraway island. For three days they (Gilgamesh and Urshanabi) ran on, as if it were a journey of a month and fifteen days.3 How many days were there in a month? The devas favored 28, so 28 days plus 15 comes to 43 days, the time needed for reaching Antarctica from Africa on a well designed raft. Here is a piroge from Melanesia.4 The reasons for Uta-napišti’s voyage are said to have been a growth in population, leading to ‘intolerable uproar’ and a great flood, but the sequence of events is more likely to have been a great rising of the waters, followed by squabbling as to who was then entitled to remaining land, followed in turn by some emigration. If southeast Asia and South America were first settled by seadogs, do they share symbols less common elsewhere? The hand The human hand forms one of the most ancient themes of human art. Prehistoric examples of hand prints (positive images formed by covering the hand with paint and placing it on a surface, rather like modern children create) and stencils (negative images formed by placing the hand against a surface and blowing paint around it) are known from prehistoric contexts in Latin America, the Sahara, Indonesia, Australia and 2 Rondônia, Wikipedia, 2016 3 Gilgamesh 4 Now in the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem, Berlin [email protected] Voyages of the Magi (3) 4 Tasmania … stretching back at least to 35,000 years ago … Usually stencils cluster in certain areas of deep caves … Around 43 French and Spanish caves are known to contain Palaeolithic hand prints and stencils … Associations with cracks were very evident too.5 The symbol is widespread but not throughout the Asian mainland. Indeed all sites are near the sea or were near it when the images were made. The one furthest from the sea may be one in the Sahara in southern Egypt, but the site seems to have been on the shore of a huge lake (about 30,759 km sq), reaching northwards to the Mediterranean, as implied by not only geological evidence but also images of swimmers left on the rocks. The images are no personal mementos, since some are of the feet of emus (Australia), rheas (Patagonia) or the desert monitor (Sahara). Here are some from the southwestern coast of Sulawesi: The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world.6 Here are some from Balloon Cave in Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland, Western Australia. 5 Hand stencils in upper Palaeolithic cave art, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, www.dur.ac.uk, 2016 6 Aubert, M. et al. Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, Letter, Nature, 30 April 2014 [email protected] Voyages of the Magi (3) 5 And here are some from the Cave of Hands in Patagonia near the tip of South America. What do the hands mean? As in the case of the nummulite bearing a cross, we need only record the key features then look for a cosmological explanation. The key features are: 1. Mainly on a white or russet background, sometimes a black one 2. Mainly white in themselves but sometimes russet 3. Not specifically human but also of desert creatures 4. Mainly in the form of stencils 5. Associated with cracks 6. Sometimes paired 7. Sometimes next to stalactites in places hard to reach As regards the hue of the background (1): At the embarkation of the magi as shown by Giovanni da Modena, the earth-centered model of the system of planets and the tallying social order is symbolized in the background by a moon-shaped boat, a russet church and Satan, standing for the 1st, 3rd and 5th of the five planets in the earth-centered model of the system. They can also be symbolized by hues – white for the moon, russet for Mars, and black for the outer space beyond Saturn. In effect the hands stand for the earth-centered model of the system and the tallying social order. As regards the hue of the hands (2): The 1st, 3rd and 5th of the five planets in the original model of the system were the moon (white), Mars (russet) and Saturn (yellowish white). White