From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a
word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in
kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.
What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance,
centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies
of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief
astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been
associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies.
On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades,
the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia,
on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings:
and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral
Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the
South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by
their seaward rising and setting. The _Matarii i nia_, or season of
the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group
appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the _Matarii i
raro_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they
are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above
the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one
in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged
them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the
several Persian words, from the ancient _Perv_ or the _Parur_ of Hafiz
or the _Parwin_ of Omar Khayyam--derive from _Peru_, a word signifying
‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or
to their _lucida_ not only the first great temple of Athenê on the
Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon
of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same
side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier
Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked
towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are
the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere
‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the
Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great
Spirit--_Groaperikie_, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this
Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster
once more hangs visible in the northern sky.
It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of
the nomenclature, of the literature, of scientific knowledge and
speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter in a book might
be given to Alcyone alone--that bright particular star of which it
has been calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would sink to a star
below the tenth magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after
the astronomer’s calm march with dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy
is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the Pleiadic
group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen
therein only a small cluster of tiny stars, the ‘seven’ of Biblical and
poetic and legendary lore, from ‘the Seven Archangels’ to the popular
‘Hen and her six chicks.’ Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate
heavens, is eighty-three times more refulgent than that magnificent
star Sirius, which has been called the ‘Glory of the South’: a thousand
times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and Taygeta, Celeno
and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has
been calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and
Electra about four hundred and eighty times larger. When one thinks
of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the winged imagination
can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail: at most one can but
recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, ‘_Seek Him
that maketh Pleiades and Orion_,’ or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, ‘_O
day star, son of the morning_.’
A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under
different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the
seas and the tides, that Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta
and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment rivers and feed the
well-springs, and that Maia’s breath falls in dew. The detail is
fanciful; the central thought is in accord with legend and old wisdom.
I do not know how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water,
particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has been traced. It runs
through many ancient records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks of
‘retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades,’ and mention has
already been made of the Hindû association of them with ‘Flame.’ But
Hesiod’s allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in
a warm country where the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with
days of sweltering closeness and heat. Moreover, Hesiod himself uses
equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him, speaking
of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with
Pindar, Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying
from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest mention of them in
ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds; and again as ‘the Seven
Virgins’ and ‘the Virgin stars’--thus at one with his contemporary, the
Hebrew Herdsman-prophet Amos, who called them by a word rendered in
the Authorised Version of the Bible as ‘the seven stars.’ As for the
Hindû symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred
and primitive element, and that every begetter of life in any form
would naturally be thus associate. The Hindûs called the Pleiad-Month
(October-November) _Kartik_, and the reason of the great star-festival
_Dībalī_, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy, after
the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of
dry warmth and beauty. The ‘sweet influences’ of the Pleiades thus
indicated will come more familiarly to many readers in Milton’s
“the grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc’d,
Shedding sweet influence,...”
This ancient custom, the ‘Feast of Lamps,’ of the Western Hindûs
survives to-day in the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ in Japan, though few
Europeans seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.
In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent,
both in ancient and modern tradition, with springs and rains and
floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the comment in the old
_Breeches_ Bible, opposite the mention of ‘the mystic seven’ in that
supreme line in Job: ‘which starres arise when the sunne is in Taurus,
which is the spring time, and bring flowres.’ A Latin poet, indeed,
used _Pliada_ as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them
as the _Vergiliae_, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately
connected too with traditions of the Deluge: and in this association,
perhaps also with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive to
note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in that remote,
mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient
tradition of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time
of their midnight culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked
the middle of the night by the setting of those wild-doves of the
sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them _Aetos_, our
‘Altair,’ the nocturnal timekeepers.
But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive
the word ‘Pleiades’ or ‘Pliades,’ and in the singular ‘Plias,’ from
the Greek word _plein_, ‘to sail,’ because (to quote an eminent living
authority) ‘the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening
of navigation to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did
the close’--and though others consider that the derivation is from
_pleios_, the epic form of the Greek word for ‘full,’ or, in the
plural, ‘many’--and so to the equivalent ‘a cluster,’ corresponding
to the Biblical _Kimāh_ and the Arabic _Al Thuruyya_, the Cluster,
the Many Little Ones--it is perhaps more likely that a less learned
and ordinary classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering
the most probable derivation to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek
mythology--‘Pleione, the mother of the seven sisters,’ as she was
called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek poets
alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to
the infant Zeus.[1] To this day, indeed, a common English designation
for the group is ‘the Seven Sisters’: and lovers of English poetry
will hardly need to be reminded of kindred allusions, from Chaucer’s
‘Atlantes doughtres sevene’ to Milton’s ‘the seven Atlantic sisters’
(reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil’s ‘Eoae Atlantides’) or to
Keats’ ‘The Starry Seven, old Atlas’ children.’ The mediæval Italians
had ‘the seven doves’ again (_sette palommiele_), and to-day their
compatriots speak of the ‘seven dovelets.’ It would be tiresome to go
through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races,
and a few instances will equally indicate the prevalence, since the
Anglo-Saxon _sifunsterri_. Miles Coverdale, in the first complete
English Bible, comments on the passage in Job, ‘these vii. starres, the
clocke henne with her chickens’; and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other
English counties ‘the Hen and her Chickens’ is a popular term, as it
is, in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the
number seven, throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of
this association with seven may be traced from the ancient Celtic ‘The
Seven Hounds’ to the still more ancient ‘seven beneficent sky-spirits
of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta’ or to the again more ancient ‘Seven
Sisters of Industry’ of remote Chinese folklore. This feminine allusion
in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the
Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred thought of the Roman
writer Manilius--‘The narrow Cloudy Train of female stars’ ... _i.e._,
no doubt, Pleione and her daughters.
[1] On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by Mr.
D’Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to
a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) to οἰνάς,
a dove, so called from its purple-red breast like wine, οἶνος, and
naturally referred to a bunch of grapes; or perhaps because the bird
appeared in migration at the time of the Vintage. [And see his further
evidence of Cilician coins.]
Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely
Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore.
What range, indeed, to cover ... since we should have to go back to
two thousand years B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the
Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the poets of
all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the _Mu’allakāt_,
as translated by Sir William Jones: ‘It was the hour when the Pleiades
appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously
decked with gems’: or that line in Graf’s translation of Sadi’s
_Gulistân_ ... ‘as though the tops of the trees were encircled by
the necklace of the Pleiades’: or, or our own day, of a verse such as
Roscoe Thayer’s:
“slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,”
or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful couplet in _Locksley
Hall_:
“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”
As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they
enshrine. ‘Seamen’s starres’ our own King Jamie called them, after
the popular use. The Finns call them ‘the Sieve,’ and the Provençals
‘the mosquito net,’ and the Italians ‘the Battledore.’ With the
nomad Arabs they are ‘the Herd of Camels.’ Peoples so apart as the
ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks of
Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely
severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called
them ‘the Dancers’: to the Solomon Islanders they are ‘a group of
girls,’ and (strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the
Australian aborigines thought of them as ‘Young Girls playing to Young
Men dancing.’ There is perhaps no stranger name than our Gaelic
_Crannarain_ (though _Grioglachan_ or _Meanmnach_ is more common),
_i.e._, the baker’s peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker
and his wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular
Cuckoo myth.
But an end to this long excerpting from ‘starry notes’! In a later
chapter, too, I propose to write of ‘Winter Stars,’ and the Great
Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way--and I must take warning in time to
condense better and write ‘more soothly’ as Chaucer has it. So, now,
let me end with a quotation from Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s preface to his
_Greek Birds_, to which I have alluded in a footnote. ‘As the White
Doves came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile,
so over the sea and the islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names.
And our Aryan studies must not blind us to the presence in an Aryan
tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or from
the nameless and forgotten language that was spoken by the gods.’
Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of
old forgotten faiths and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month!
What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the
Arabian shepherd looked up from the illimitable desert and called this
dim cluster, this incalculable congregation of majesty and splendour,
_Al Najm_, ‘the Constellation’ ... ‘_the_ Constellation’: since the
first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit Sahara to bow before
_Al Wasat_, the Central One: since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed
the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set,
changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives
... for not long ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who
spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and named them
newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace.