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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
If we come fresh from Aryan mythology to that of Man gaia, and read that the Universe (Avaiki), in the form of cocoa-nut shell, rests on a thick stem, gradually tapering to a point, and that this point is conceived as a demon, without human form, and that its name Te-aka-ia-roé signifies the Root of all Existence, we imagine ourselves in the Brâhmanas and Upanishads. Likewise, when we read that above this extreme point there is another demon called Tie-tangacngaie, which means Breathing, and then again another called Temanava-roa, which means The Long-lived, all this seems abstract, speculative, systematical, or late. But is it so? Do we know that it is so, and that it could not be otherwise ?
Let us go a step further. As we advance into the interior of the cocoa-nut shell, we meet at the very bottom with an old woman, a demon of flesh and blood, called Vari-mate-takave. What is the meaning of her name? We are told, The very Beginning, or literally The Beginning and the Bottom. This sounds again abstract enough. But she herself is no mere abstraction. She plucks a bit of her right side, and it became the First Man. Many stories are told about that First Man. He is balf man, half fish; his one eye was human, the other a fish-eye; his right side was furnished with an arm, the left with a fin. He had one proper foot, and half a fish tail. He had, as we shall see, brothers, and became in fact a purely legendary character. Yet he was clearly in the beginning a nominal concept of the sky. His name is Avatea or Vatea, and that still means Noon. And now the legend tells that Vatea had two magnificent eyes, rarely visible at the same time. In general, whilst one, called by the mortals the Sun, is seen here in this upper world, the other eye, called by men the Moon, shines in Avaiki. Of course this is not the only myth. In another myth the sun and moon are not the eyes of Vatea, but themselves living beings, and no one is offended by such contradictions. They are all true alike, as long as people were able to understand
