Today I stumbled across this image with the caption "Palmer’s watercolour (1868, previously unpublished) of a two-headed bird and a stylised Frigatebird. Image: courtesy Royal Geographical Society with IBG"
Well, you know me and my hypothesis (so far proven to be true in all the cases I investigated), that two headed birds are animal calendar marker for the time when the depicted bird mates...Check this article about Golden eagles from Costa Rica...
The watercolours were made by John Linton Palmer, a Royal Navy Surgeon and painter who made voyages to the Pacific in the 1850s and 1860s including on HMS Topaze...This is one of his paintings from that trip: Strait of Magellan, Port Gallant, South part of Tierra del Fuego (1866). Beautiful...
During his Pacific voyage Palmer visited Easter Island, where he made the above painting of two stone slabs he came across on the island. Same slabs were photographed by William Safford in 1886, during the American expedition led by William Judah Thomson...
Both Palmer's painting and Safford's photo can be found on this great page entitled "Bringing back the Birdman: restoring colour to the sacred cult of Easter Island"...
Who the hell is the Birdman? Well, glad you asked...Another great image from the above page: "Painted slab with facing birdmen belonging to the collections of the Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert (MAPSE) Easter Island"...
So who is (was) The Birdman? The ethnographic records collected on the island tell us that in the past, there was a very important ceremony performed every year in the spring, to choose The Birdman...
First, people would climb to the top of the Easter Island's Ranu Kao volcano...
There they would gather in a sacred Orongo village...
The village is perched on a cliff 250 meters above the sea...You can see the houses in the bottom right corner of this image...
Why there? Cause that was the point located directly across a very important group of islets: Motu Nui, with the smaller Motu Iti in front and the isolated sea stack of Motu Kau Kau between them and the viewer...
Why were these islets important? Cause Motu Nui was the nesting ground of Sooty Terns, sea birds which spend most of the year on the open ocean, and only come to land to nest...
And this is what the people gathered in the Orongo village were waiting for. The arrival of Sooty Terns, known in local Rapa Nui language as Manutara or Manu Tara (Luck Bird)...
There was no chance to miss the arrival of the Luck Birds, because of the noise they make once they are on land...And once they arrived, The Birdman competition began...
Originally, the chosen contestants, all men of high rank, descended down the cliff face, and then swam to Motu Nui. There they stayed, until one of them found the first egg laid by one of the Luck Birds...
This lucky man was then crowned The Birdman...For a year...
The race was very dangerous and many contestants were killed by falling from the cliff face, or by drowning, or by sharks...Which is why eventually the men of high rank delegated the dangerous bit of the ritual to men of lower rank who competed in their name...Of course it was still the noble man who became The Birdman...Life's unfair...
Anyway...The Birdman cult was suppressed by Christian missionaries in the 1860s. The origin of the cult and the time thereof are uncertain, as it is unknown whether the cult replaced the preceding Moai based religion or had co-existed with it...
Most sources say that The Birdman cult appeared after the collapse of the original Moai based religion. This happened after destruction of the local ecosystem including complete deforestation, which happened between 1200 and 1650 AD...
But in "Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture", JoAnne Van Tilburg argues that The Birdman cult most likely coexisted with the Moai cult...
Well, what JoAnne says is that the Birdman cult was originally more about fish than birds...And mostly about Tuna fish...Which arrive to Easter Island waters in spring (Southern Hemisphere spring), around the time when Sooty Terns come to nest on Motu Nui...
The Easter Islanders had a tapu (taboo) related to the prohibition of eating Tuna fish from autumn to spring. Meaning that the Tuna fishing season was spring to autumn...Starting after The Birdman ceremony...
Some archeo-astronomy sources claim that the fishing season coincided with the period when the constellation Matariki (the Pleiades) was visible in the southern sky, mid Nov to mid Apr...
But I think that the old Eater Islander didn't need stars to tell them when to start fishing for Tunas...They had a much more accurate Tuna timer: Sooty Terns which count on Tunas to provide them with their favourite food: squid...Excerpt from "Easter Island: Archaeology, Ecology and Culture"...
Which is why the arrival of the Luck Birds to start their mating and nesting and egg laying, followed by The Birdman ceremony, signalled the arrival of Tunas, and the beginning of the Tuna fishing season, the season of plenty...
Well, season of plenty, providing you had a boat to go fishing in...And to make a boat, you need trees...No trees, no boats, no fishing, no tuna...So if The Birdman cult developed after the deforestation, then all of this fishy stuff makes no sense...
And if The Birdman cult developed after the deforestation, then we shouldn't see things like this: Hoa Hakananai'a, a statue from Easter Island, found in Orongo in 1868 by John Linton Palmer and brought to the British Museum...Drawing by Plamer...
This is the enhanced image of the back of this statue from "Bringing back the Birdman: restoring colour to the sacred cult of Easter Island"
Two Birdmen – crouch facing each other. Above them is a stylised bird, and on either side there are ceremonial paddles and depictions of fertility symbols (wombs)...
The birdmen are always depicted with Frigatebird beaks. Here the left Birdman is male (with neck pouch) and the right Birdman (Birdwoman 🙂) is a female with an egg in her hands...
The bird between them is a Sooty Terns...
Both Sooty Terns and Frigatebirds nest at the same time, during the Tuna fishing season...Some nesting data from the area can be found here...
Hence the paddles...Used in fishing boats...
I don't think this composition would have been made after Easter Islanders cut the last tree, and were not able to make fishing boats any more...So the Birdman cult must have coexisted with the Moai cult...And was, as JoAnne Van Tilburg claims, originally about boats and fish...
Anyway...Back to our two headed bird...Which I postulated was an animal calendar marker for the mating season of the depicted bird...It turned out, I was right...The luck of the Luck Bird I guess...🙂
PS: Thanks to @another_barbara for pointing out that the tail of the double headed bird looks like tuna fin...Missed that completely...Cool...
To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...
No comments:
Post a Comment