The picture has no title, it also has no name, and the painter has no right to interfere with the knowledge of ancient cultural wisdom about his subjective attitude to art. You don't paint such a picture of your own free will - you are given the task of fixing it with the modern possibilities of artistic design. What could be considered the title, however, is the testimony of an old man on Tonga, who was one of those known as "The Learned in nautical Science". It is the sacred creed of all navigators in the South Pacific who never accepted the compass of explorers and conquerors as a real alternative to their knowledge of ra-ririki, the little suns that we call stars. On their long and always goal-oriented trips in the Pacific, they orientated themselves on the large compass above them and really didn't trust a tiny, wobbling needle point. None other than James Cook had great admiration and praise for the sailors who were star-oriented and whose meteorological knowledge impressed even the great European sailor Cook. You can read that in his logbooks!

All over the world, people recognized images in the stars by connecting stars with imaginary lines. Two constellations can be seen on this circular board, only about 60 cm in diameter. The well-known constellation of ORION is only hinted at by glaze white. Its position corresponds to the position that we see above the northern hemisphere. Even the Orion nebula is hinted at. The first thing that catches the eye is a large stone hatchet, the blade of which is made from greenstone (that's New Zealand jade) and a sophisticated binding technique based on a masterpiece from the manufacture of a Maori on Aotea-roa, the land under the Great White Cloud (New Zealand) , lets close.

The three belt stars in Orion and three other very faint stars are no longer connected by the usual skeleton lines of constellations, but rather are applied to the painted stone ax as cabochons made from Tagua nuts. This is the 2nd constellation. This Toki (stone ax) was known as a constellation everywhere in Polynesia. The Polynesian navigators explained their concept of way finding in simple terms: along the (rotating) sky.

This picture always hangs correctly in any of the 360 ° possible positions! I don't know of a picture that also applies. The Polynesian constellation of the hatchet in Orion is upright when seen from us, but seen upside down from the southern hemisphere. If the picture were acquired by someone living in the southern hemisphere, he would hang it up according to his point of view.

No script was ever invented on any of the many islands in Oceania. NOT ALSO ON THE EASTER ISLAND! The chiefs had only contempt and boundless distrust of the writing of their language. Secrets were only safely hidden in the minds of selected initiates. "No cave, no place in the world is so secret that my enemy could not find it, too," argued the Ariki, the chiefs, and everyone who was warned of the possibility by European and other seafarers, using written notations of their secret knowledge to make. Only people under the strictest taboo preferred death before they were ready to break the taboo.

Somewhere and at some point, clever people in the Pacific cultural area invented a system of pictorial signs with which they could fix the secret knowledge about Way Finding in the Pacific, about star courses, so that it would be available again in the event of a renaissance of their culture. These pictorial signs that run around the circle are symbols for stars and planets, for all Heavenly Bodies, which the navigators in their boats only followed on their heavenly paths through the night. Rongorongo is a system of pictorial signs that could be used to write down what everyone knew in principle who followed their heavenly ancestors in their boats in the sea, the ancestors we call stars and planets.

(If you want to know more about it, you can find detailed and easily understandable works on the supposed Easter Island script at www.rongorongo-script.de)

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The Compass May Go Wrong - The Stars Never by Michael H. Dietrich. Available as an art print on canvas, photo paper, watercolor board, uncoated paper or Japanese paper.
easter island · writing · astronomical symbols · ethno-astronomy · star navigation · polynesia