II

Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is Polaris, the Pole Star

or Lodestar: of all winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little

Dipper (to give the common designations), Orion, and the lovely cluster

of the Pleiades, are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly observed

stellar groups. One of our old Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing

towards the close of the fifteenth or early in the sixteenth century,

thus quaintly brought them into conjunction--

“Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane,

Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane,

The fiers Orion with his goldin glave.”

Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar

and Arcturus (or, as often given in the North, ‘Arturus’ or ‘Arthur’

... a word itself signifying the Great or Wondrous Bear) were often

confused. Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole constellation of

Ursa Major--or, as we commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as, for

example, in Scott’s lines:

“Arthur’s slow wain his course doth roll,

In utter darkness, round the Pole.”

But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not mean this to be understood,

for in the second line he speaks of ‘Charlewane,’ _i.e._, Charles’s

Wain ... the Wain or Waggon being then, as it still is among

country-folk, even more familiar a term than the Great Bear or than the

Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in mind the Pole Star, the ‘House

of Arthur’ of the ancient British. His choice of the ‘rain-betokening

Hyades’ may be taken here as including the Pleiades, these ‘greater

seven’ in whom centres so much poetry and old legend. A previous paper

has been devoted to the Milky Way, so that there is no need to explain

why Watling Street should be analogous with the Galaxy. The ‘Horne’ is

the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. Than ‘fierce Orion with his glistering

sword’ there is no constellation so universally familiar. If, then, to

this category of the old Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran,

and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, we have more than enough

Winter Lights to consider in one chapter.

Having already, however, dealt with ‘the watery constellations’ we can

be the more content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta, Electra,

and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus. This great constellation is

one of the earliest in extant astronomical records: the earliest,

it is believed. The stellar image of a Bull has occurred to many

nations since the designation first arose among the ancient Cretans

or Akkadians--if, indeed, in its origin it was not immeasurably more

remote. East and West, in the deserts of the South and among the grey

isles of the North, ‘the Bull’ was recognised. To-day the Scottish

peasant still calls it ‘the Steer,’ as his German kinsman does in _der

Stier_, his French kinsman in _le Taureau_, his Spanish or Italian

kinsman in _Toro_. When certain of the Greeks and Latins used _Keráon_

and _Cornus_ instead of _Tauros_ and _Taurus_, they said merely the

same thing--the Horned One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises the

image in the first ‘Georgic’:

“When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes

The year....”

just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful ‘Hymn to Taurus,’ writes:

“... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey

The glinting of thy horn

And sullen front, uprising large and dim

Bent to the starry Hunter’s sword at bay.”

Among our own ancestors, the Druids made Taurus an object of worship,

the Tauric Festival having been one of the great events of the year,

signalised when the sun first entered the imagined frontiers of this

constellation. To-day, among the homesteads of our Scottish lowlands,

the farm-folk tell of the Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the

gloaming on New Year’s Eve and move slowly to the dark pastures which

await his coming.

The particular stellar glory of this constellation is Aldebaran. This

beautiful star has appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I do

not know what were its earliest Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names. But as

in Gaelic it is sometimes called ‘the Hound,’ this term may well be a

survival from ancient days. If so, there is an interesting relation

with the primitive Arabic name by which it is all but universally

known. Aldebaran is _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: and, figuratively,

a follower could hardly be better symbolised than by a hound. I

recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis where the analogy is still

further emphasised, for there Aldebaran is called ‘the Hound of the

Pleiades,’ which is exactly what the Arabian astronomers implied in

‘the Follower.’ Another interesting resemblance is between ‘the red

hound’ of the Gaelic poet and legend and the _Rohinī_ of the Hindûs,

that word signifying ‘a red deer’ ... in each case the ruddy gleam of

the star having suggested the name. Probably it was this characteristic

which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the name ‘Lampadias’ or the

Torch-Bearer. In the narration of folk-tales I have more than once or

twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as the star of good fortune, of ‘the

golden luck.’ With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and may be

seen at its finest from the latter part of January till the approach of

the vernal equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be gained from the

fact that this is thrice the outflow of the Pole Star. How often I have

stood on a winter’s night, and watched awhile this small red ‘torch’

burning steadfastly in the unchanging heavens, and thought of its vast

journeys, of that eternal, appalling procession through the infinite

deeps: how often I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery when,

watching its silent fire in what appears an inexorable fixity, I recall

what science tells us, that it is receding from our system at an all

but unparalleled velocity, a backward flight into the unknown at the

rate of thirty miles a second.

It would be hopeless to attempt here even the briefest account of the

primitive and diverse nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of

Orion ... the Winter-Bringer, as this constellation is called in an

old Scandinavian saga, identical thus with the marginal reading in the

Geneva Bible relative to the reference to Orion in Job--‘which starre

bringeth in winter,’ an allusion to its evening appearance at the

season of cold and storms. For these things are writ in the records

of a hundred nations. They are alive in the poetry of all peoples.

Centuries before our era, when Thebes was the greatest city of Greece,

the poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior, the Great Hunter,

whose nightly course was so glorious above the dusky lands and waters

of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek poets, Catullus and Horace

gave it a like preeminence in Latin literature. In our own poetry, many

surely will recall from _Paradise Lost_:

“... when with fierce winds Orion arm’d

Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew

Busiris and his Memphian chivalry....”

or Tennyson’s beautiful line in _Locksley Hall_:

“Great Orion sloping slowly to the west....”

or, it may be, that epic of ‘Orion’ upon which is based Richard Hengist

Horne’s claim to remembrance--or, once more, Matthew Arnold’s fine

allusion to Sirius and Orion in _Sohrab and Rustum_:

“... the Northern Bear,

Who from her frozen height with jealous eye

Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South.”

Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had identified Orion both with

Horus and Osiris. Among the peoples of Israel the poets acclaimed

the constellation as Nimrod, ‘the mighty Hunter’ (or by another

term signifying the Giant), ‘bound to the sky for rebellion against

Jehovah.’ Among the Celtic races it has had kindred names, sometimes

abstract, sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A year or so ago I

was told a sea-tale of the Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to

this constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is of especial interest,

because of its connection with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great

Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a modern, not an ancient tale,

though with more than one strange old survival) the major position

is not held by Fionn, but by the Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is

represented as succumbing under the spear thrust in his left side by

the enraged Fionn, at last in grips with the daring chieftain who had

robbed him of Grania. When questioned, my informant said he had heard

a variant of this attribution, and that the constellation was an image

of Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a swoon, because she and

her lover have been overtaken by the wrath of Fionn ... though from the

description I could not make out whether the latter indicated the star

Sirius, or the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The Gaels of old

called Orion _Caomai_, a name said to signify the Armed King: while the

_Gall_ (the Scandinavian races) applied the name _Orwandil_, but with

what signification I do not know, though I have read somewhere that it

stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.

Of the chief stars in Orion there is not space here to speak. But

of the splendid Rigel--as affluent in the mysterious science of the

astrologer as in nocturnal light--pearly Anilam, of the Belt or

Sword--ominous Bellatrix--ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze--of these alone one

might write much ... as one might write much of the Girdle or Staff

itself, what Scott in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ calls ‘Orion’s

studded belt.’ It has a score of popular names, from the Danish Frigge

Rok (Freya’s Distaff) to the seamen’s ‘Yard-arm,’ as, collectively, its

three great stars have all manner of names in different countries, from

the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three Marys, to The Rake of the

French Rhinelanders or the Three Mowers of the Silesian peasant.

Those who have studied the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades will

remember how universally the numeral seven is associated with their

varying nomenclature. But there was, and still is among primitive

peoples, not infrequent confusion in the use of ‘The Seven Stars’ as a

specific name. Although from China to Arabia, from India and Persia to

the Latin countries of the South, the term almost invariably designates

the Pleiades, in the folklore of many Western nations it is used for

the seven planets, and in many Northern races it is often used for the

seven brilliant stars of the Great Bear. Even the Biblical allusion

to ‘The Seven Stars,’ as our own Anglo-Saxon ancestral _Sifunsterri_,

does not necessarily indicate the Pleiades: many consider the seven

great planets to be meant. There is a Shetland rune, common to all

the north isles and to be heard in Iceland and Norway, known as the

rune of sevens, and of which one of the invocatory lines is ‘And by

da seven shiners.’ All kinds of interpretation have explained this,

from the obvious ‘seven planets,’ or else the Pleiades, to the Seven

Candlesticks of Revelation and I know not what besides. I have again

and again asked fisher-folk or others from the Orkneys and Shetlands,

and in all but one or two instances the answer has clearly indicated

the Great Bear, occasionally Polaris and the Ursine Arcturus and their

nearest brilliant ‘shiners.’ Again, _Crannarain_, one of the Gaelic

names for the Pleiades, is, perhaps, as often applied to the Great

Bear: the curious legend of the Baker’s Shovel, implied in the Gaelic

term, fitting equally.

Of the Great Bear, of the North Star, however, I have already spoken.

Of Polaris itself, indeed, there is more than enough to draw upon.

Years ago I began an MS. book called ‘The Book of the North Star,’

and from my recollection of it (for at the moment of writing I am far

from my books) I should say there is enough folklore and legend and

various interest connected with this star wherefrom to evolve a volume

solely devoted to it. It is strange that ‘the Lamp of the North’ should

have so fascinated all the poets from the time of Homer till to-day,

and yet that all have dwelled in the same illusion as to its absolute

steadfastness. Nevertheless, Homer’s

“Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave”

has both poetic truth and the truth of actuality.

It is a relief to put aside notes and pen and paper, and to go out and

look up into the darkness and silence, to those ‘slow-moving palaces

of wandering light’ of which one has been writing. How overwhelmingly

futile seems not only the poor written word, but even the mysterious

pursuit of the far-fathoming thought of man. By the sweat of the brow,

by the dauntless pride of the mind, we mortal creatures have learned

some of the mysteries of the coming and going in infinitude of these

incalculable worlds, of their vast procession from the unknown to

the unknown. Then, some night, one stands solitary in the darkness,

and feels less than the shadow of a leaf that has passed upon the

wind, before these still, cold, inevitable, infinitely remote yet

overwhelmingly near Children of Immortality.