Kaitangata and the Tower of Babel

This door picture led me on a little journey that just keeps going. The door is on a carved house called Kaitangata on Mana Island off New Zealand.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f42dd03ab4aa.jpg[/atsimg]

[Note that the door shape is similar to the Greek number Pi, relating to circles, and the letter Pi and astronomy.]

I was intrigued by the name "Kaitangata" - translated as “man eater” in Maori (kai-tangata). …Perhaps men who go through the door do not return: the door "eats men." Or maybe something predatory comes through the door and eats them?

Remembering the Tower of Babel, and because "gata" suggests "gate," I did a little digging on Google. Translations from other languages suggest other meanings - but that bit about cannibalism is hard to forget.

KAITEN
Japanese - 回天, literal translation: "Return to the sky" - also means turning around a (literal or figurative) axis - a spinning wheel is kaiten, or perhaps a celestial body's orbit.
Indonesian - "connection"

GATA
Japanese - ancient: "path" or "way" - modern literal translation: "model" or "pattern," also "form"
Old Norse - "path," "way," "street," "road"
Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian - "street"
Serbian - "pier"
Filipino - "extract"
Romanian - "ready"

KATA - (alt.)
Indonesian, Malay - "word" (password?)
Japanese - "form," "more"
Pitjantjatjara (Central Australia) - "head"
Kurdish, Persian - "house," "place," "city"
Hungarian - Blessed, Pure, Holy

Also see:
Kata people

Any other ideas about this? Does anyone know of any other doors whose names have suggestive meanings? Or suggestive meanings when translated in other languages?






Thanks to Julie Washington for starting me on this little quest - and of course, undo for planting the seeds.

BACKGROUND links

KAITANGATA. (myth.), a son of the god Rehua. He was slain by Rupe (Maui-mua) in an accidental manner—P. M., 53. (For full story, see Maori part, p. 37.) The story is a very repulsive one, and is untranslatable as it stands, but is evidently not understood, or greatly corrupted. Te Pou-o-Whatitiri, the cause of Kaitangata's death, is one of the constellations. A ruddy glow in the sky is proverbially said to be the blood of Kaitangata (ka tuhi Kaitangata). 2. A man beloved by Whaitiri (Thunder). She was fond of human flesh, and, deceived by the name (Kai-tangata, “man eater,”) came to him and became his wife. (See Wohl., Trans., vii. 15, and 41.) Kaitangata was the father of Hema, who was the father of Tawhaki. [See Tawhaki, Hina, Tangotango, &c. For Hawaiian genealogy, see Tawhaki.]

Image link

George Swainson drawing of doorway to Kaitangata.
Drawing from Pataka Museum Collection, at Porirua Library ref Q.1a.5.

You know that doorway thing, Ive seen before, several sites have something like that I think, I remember a post awhile back about star gates or something.

reply to post by benrl


Yes Julie Washington's thread on stargates - I posted there and linked to her thread in the OP.

reply to post by soficrow


Personally I think its due to perhaps an ancient well traveled civilization that we have yet to discover, perhaps an anti-deluvian societie (pre food) would explain the commonality of monolithic stone structures.

reply to post by benrl


Cool. ...but how about the names for these doorways?

Do you know of any door names that translate in interesting ways?

i never heard of this before but that doorway is stupendously beautiful

simply breathtaking ,I have always been struck by how much Maori art and building resemble
some interpretations of celtic buildings and art. the wow factor on the beauty and craftsmanship of this thing cannot be overstated

Soficrow,

Isn't frustrating when you find things like this and everything you read just presents more questions and you know it all means something and it's all related, but you just can't put it all together? That's how I feel. Keep up the good work and the search!

reply to post by Julie Washington


Thanks Julie. ...at this point, I'm just happy to contribute to any meme questioning archaeological dogma.

That, and I love learning - questions opening up like flowers into new questions are the kind I like.

reply to post by soficrow
Hiya Sofi, your comment about 'archaeological dogma' bugged me a little. Where is there any evidence of 'dogma' relating to this illustration of a doorway?

I agree that the image resembles a Pi symbol (π) and yet how else would two uprights and a lintel (cross-beam) appear? The design of doorways are inevitable as a function of load-bearing dynamics. Without the uprights, the doorway would collapse and without lintels the uprights are redundant.

If you look towards the doorway in the room you're in, behind the plastering are lintels. Nowadays they are steels or timber, but some modern buildings still utilise stone or wooden beams.

Maori doorways, like the illustration, had structural requirements that were also symbolic and decorative. Rather than a 'dogma,' it's Maori history that tells us what these doorways represented. The carved lintels are called 'pare.'

The central figure represents the family lineage of the owner of the building and the carvings, left and right, depict their ancestors.

You can check it out at these links...The Carved Pare: a Maori mirror of the universe or at Tracing the Grotesque: Angas and Kaitangata

Most if not all architecture will have some sort of symbolism attached to it. Not due to designed but due to the vast number of symbols and symbolism that now exist.

Challenge for you; create a useful architectural design that has NO symbolism in it taking into account all previous and current religions and cultures.....

reply to post by Kandinsky

Hiya Sofi, your comment about 'archaeological dogma' bugged me a little. Where is there any evidence of 'dogma' relating to this illustration of a doorway?

Sorry, did not mean to offend! And no, I'm not aware of any 'dogma' related to this doorway. My statement referred to general archaeological memes, and I was actually thinking of scientists who were not archaeologists at the time (LaMarck, Agassiz, Prusiner), but suffered due to dogma.

Hope that fixes things.

reply to post by Hanslune


Although I pointed out the Pi stuff at the beginning, those details were only footnotes in my own process. It wasn't the architecture that kept me interested - it was the alternate translations of the name in different languages that got me hooked. (And comprised most of my OP.) Especially the Japanese...

Remembering the Tower of Babel, and because "gata" suggests "gate," I did a little digging on Google. Translations from other languages suggest other meanings - but that bit about cannibalism is hard to forget.

KAITEN
Japanese - 回天, literal translation: "Return to the sky" - also means turning around a (literal or figurative) axis - a spinning wheel is kaiten, or perhaps a celestial body's orbit.
Indonesian - "connection"

GATA
Japanese - ancient: "path" or "way" - modern literal translation: "model" or "pattern," also "form"
Old Norse - "path," "way," "street," "road"
Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian - "street"

...Still thinking and digging. Brushing up on everything I forgot about the Sumerians, Hindi, Anatolia, the Mayans, Chinese. Learning much. Wish I were a linguist. And a mathematician - calendars are quite important. But having lots of fun.

Just in a note for your future research

The tower of Babel was probably just the Ziggurat [of Nabonidus] in Babylon - but its height impressed the Hebrews at the time and the incorporated it into a myth to explain why there were different languages in the world

Personally, I prefer the translation as "People eaters'.
Cannibalism was a part of Maori society, as with so many other cultures.
There is also a Kaitangata down South, near Dunedin. This could possibly more correctly be pronounced as Kaitakata.
The spelling is also not 'exact' so doing a cross-lingual comparison may not be the best way of approaching this.
Then, there are also dialectal differences which don't get much notice from the majority these days as Te Reo becomes more 'universal'. For example Aorangi vs Aoraki.

reply to post by Hanslune


Thanks - but again, it's not the architecture that draws me, rather, it's the underlying concept of an original universal language. However, as aorAki points out above, "doing a cross-lingual comparison may not be the best way of approaching this." ...Even so, the Net is full of astounding resources and I'm kind of kicking myself for not pushing the window (tsk) for last few years and learning a whole lot more about these things.

...The Kaitangata door has led me down several different paths simultaneously - none possible (for me) without the Net. Tonight I was following up on linguistic arms of "gods' gates" - as Kaitangata appears to be one of the "god's gates" in design and translation - over the past week I've travelled from New Zealand to the Lycian tombs and Mheri-dur into ancient Anatolia and historic Armenia, to the Maya, Hinduism and back to my old stuff on Chinese Taoism and the I Ching (all linked by astronomy, calendars and math) - focusing this evening on the words for "god" arising from the Armenian diminutive "Astghik." Started with fact that Armenian word for "God" is asttso, the word for Venus is astghik, astlik - and ast is generally understood to also mean "star." Went on to discover that "ast" in other cultures has an opposite meaning - in Hebrew, Chinese and Turkish, ast means subordinate or underling. ...In Hindi and perhaps Japanese, the word refers to existence/ being (without rank). ...In Japanese, "ghik" refers to a companion or approach.

Fun, as I said earlier. I'm playing now, confident that it will all come together, and recognizing that Kaitangata was my starting point - a portal leading to other dimensions of knowledge.

Yes, I must make clear that my wording wasn't the best: By 'cross-lingual' I meant that, for example, the Maori language was written down by missionaries (originally) who had a particular set of phonemes that was theirs and trying to write down the phonemes of another's language proved difficult at times, so the 'best fit' was often applied, though not always 'true'...if that makes any sense.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying this thread, I just like to add my 2 bits every so often...

reply to post by aorAki


Not to diminish your knowledge and teachings - and to clarify where I'm coming from on this - my cross-linguistic translation of "Kaitangata," and the illustration, led me to discover that our planet is peppered with portals defined by their makers as "god's gates."

These "god gates" or doorways seem to relate to planets and other celestial bodies, and rely on early astronomy. The "god" attributes may be overlaid, partly to reflect greater and lesser "powers" to affect our planet. ...I've found these 'gate' concepts in all the ancient cultures I've looked at so far. Note - this is where the "stargate" idea seems to come from, which I did not "get" before.

In addition to the celestial-physical aspects, some cultures like the Hindi and the Judeo-Christian Bible consider the 'gates' to be hierarchical steps in metaphysical and spiritual 'evolution.' The Hindi have their chakras, the Chinese their chi meridians, and the pineal gland and third eye reign (knew this, forgot, was reminded).

So Kaitangata for me was the starting point of a journey into learning. ...If I am 'guilty' of anything here, it is perhaps hubris - the idea that my personal process is of interest to others and my discoveries and re-discoveries of extant and ancient knowledge are worth sharing.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
reply to post by soficrow

 

Hiya Sofi, your comment about 'archaeological dogma' bugged me a little. Where is there any evidence of 'dogma' relating to this illustration of a doorway?

'archaeological dogma' oooo goody a new term Have I ever shown you my list of why Zorgon dislikes main stream archaeologists? No? Well remind me later

In Māori mythology, Kaitangata is a mortal son of Maui and an industrious man who married the female supernatural being Whaitiri, or a son of star-god Rehua. Due to his name; Kaitangata means man-eater; Whaitiri believed him to be a cannibal as she was however this proved to be incorrect and she eventually left him because he offended her. Before she returned to heaven as a cloud, she taught Kaitangata how to fish. With Whaitiri, he was the father of Hemā.

Now of course WIKI is not the greatest source but its a start.

@OP Nice gate... will add that to my collection of 'symbolic' gates and toss it into the Stargates are real thread

Originally posted by soficrow
reply to post by aorAki

 

Not to diminish your knowledge and teachings - and to clarify where I'm coming from on this - my cross-linguistic translation of "Kaitangata," and the illustration, led me to discover that our planet is peppered with portals defined by their makers as "god's gates."

In figuring out linguistic matters, you can't do the "sounds like" or "is spelled like" as a basis. Here's why:
* the English alphabet doesn't have enough letters to accurately represent sounds (which is why the capital of China has been spelled "Peiping, Peking, Bejing, Bejin" and so forth over the years.)
* ancient languages were often written without vowels. We have no idea if "Ra" (Egyptian sun god) was pronounced "Rah" or "Ray" or "Reh" or "Ree" or "Rey" or "Ro" or "Roy" or "Rhay" ... etc, etc (and I haven't gotten into dipthongs yet.)
* root words and syllables are the key to how languages are related -- SOMEtimes. However, they may have come through several other languages (as our words based on French root words are often derived from Latin words.)
* you can't determine anything based on a single word. You have to know how it is used (and how its pieces are used) in other languages.
* you can find meaning and similarities in languages of people who live around this culture group at a certain point in time (think Mexican Spanish, Spanglish, and English here in Texas.) However, this cluster of languages is NOT related to the Khosa language spoke by some Bushmen, even though you could find syllables and possibly some words that sound similar and might even have somewhat similar meanings ("funda" and "find" in Khosa and English.) This doesn't mean that Khosa and English are related, or that "fundament" (as used in the Bible) derives from an ancient word in an ancient language that means something which is found through searching.

Originally posted by aorAki
Yes, I must make clear that my wording wasn't the best: By 'cross-lingual' I meant that, for example, the Maori language was written down by missionaries (originally) who had a particular set of phonemes that was theirs and trying to write down the phonemes of another's language proved difficult at times, so the 'best fit' was often applied, though not always 'true'...if that makes any sense.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying this thread, I just like to add my 2 bits every so often...

There's a wonderful (old, free) paper by Franz Boas (the father of anthropology) who makes the point that your own native language affects how you hear other languages. Someone from France would spell a word much differently than someone from Japan and they would both spell it differently than someone from Argentina, and all four would spell (hear) a word differently than even a well educated American.

Here's the paper. It's short, delightful, and really worth reading