Origins: A Fairy Tale of the Pleiades

The Pleiades, captured by Starhopper and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

~ Locksley Hall, Lord Alfred Tennyson

Long ago, long before Tennyson wrote Locksley Hall, or Homer wrote the Iliad, or even before unknown people painted the caves of Lascaux, the Pleiades were born.

Modern science has a story of how this happened. It involves clouds of dust, the force of gravity, and shockwaves from dying stars. The Pleiades were born slowly, in this narrative, through the unhurried gathering of atoms into tenuous clouds, and then rapidly, when the shock of a nearby supernova made those clouds collapse into balls of fire and a cluster of stars¹.

But Tennyson did not know this, nor did Homer, nor did any of the countless people who came and went before them. Yet they knew the Pleiades; and in many ways they knew them better than we pretend to now. They saw them night after night, they tracked the passage of the year through their steady movements, and they told stories of what they were and how they came to be.

The Kiowa of North America, it is said, saw the Pleiades as seven young women. Once, the stars had been girls, living in the lands we call Wyoming. But one day they encountered a bear, and as they fled in panic they begged the spirits for salvation. At first the spirits responded by raising the great rock of Devil’s Tower under the girls, lifting them into safety. But still the bears came, climbing the cliffs in pursuit. Left with little choice, the spirits took the girls into the heavens themselves, fixing them as seven stars in the sky.

So said the Kiowa. The Ancient Greeks had their own version of this story. Homer, in an epic poem written three thousand years ago, told how Odysseus navigated “staring at the Pleiades”, the seven daughters of Pleione. In place of a bear, the girls were pursued by the hunter Orion. Salvation came from Zeus, who transformed them first into doves and then into the seven stars. But later Orion joined them in the sky - and there they remain, the sisters, rising first, forever pursued by the hunter.

Curiously, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, separated by at least fifty thousand years from the Kiowa and the Greeks, tell the same story. Seven sisters, fleeing from hunters or predators, are rescued - in one case first by the rock of Uluru - and then placed into the sky, often alongside their hunter.

Curious, too, that all these peoples spoke of seven stars, when only six are clear to the naked eye.

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I. Prehistory

Today we like to speak of discoveries. Columbus discovered the Americas; Newton discovered gravity. But to our deep ancestors the question of who discovered the Pleiades would sound nonsensical, like asking who discovered the Sun or the Moon. The stars formed a part of the cosmos we emerged into; a component to our ancestors as fundamental as the trees and the creatures.

Even so, there must have been a time when humans, or creatures like us, first started to look up at the stars and wonder. We know some animals look at them - experiments have shown that birds can use the constellations to navigate - but none see stories in the stars. None find patterns in them, or try to explain how they came to be.

We do not know when this happened. But it is on fairly solid ground that our species first emerged about three hundred thousand years ago in the Horn of Africa; that it did not originate alone but in the company of other humanlike species; and that by about fifty thousand years ago it had spread across the planet.

At some point - perhaps about seventy thousand years ago, or perhaps as much as a hundred and fifty - signs of symbolic thinking appeared. Humans learned to use language, they began etching patterns on shells and beads, and they started to paint walls with red ochre and other materials.

Much of what we created in that time has been lost. But in 1940, a young man and his dog discovered a cave near the manor of Lascaux in France. Inside the walls were painted with pictures - of animals, of horses, of bulls, of cats, a rhinoceros, and even, in the deepest most part of the cave, a human.

The paintings of the Lascaux caves are undoubtedly old. Scattered around them, in the landscapes of the Dordogne, are other painted caves, some of which stretch back over a hundred thousand years. Charcoal from one sketch - also of a rhinoceros - was once dated at thirty-two thousand years old. Those in Lascaux seem a little younger. The evidence we have suggests they were painted between seventeen and twenty-two millennia ago.

Inside the caves, in a room near the entrance called the “hall of the bulls” stands a large painting. It shows an auroch, the ancestor of the cow, and etched above it is a pattern of six dots. These dots are not arranged haphazardly, but deliberately, as though they resemble a natural object. They look, indeed, rather like the Pleiades.

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The caves of Lascaux. Credit: X (left), JoJan (right)

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II. Calendars

Why would the ancients have painted the Pleiades on the walls of a cave? One possibility is that the stars acted as a rudimentary calendar. Seventeen thousand years ago, the star cluster would have disappeared from the sky each year towards the end of August. Six weeks later, on the 11th October, it would have reappeared, emerging from behind the Sun to rise just before dawn.

Five months after that, the Pleiades would reach their highest point in the sky, on a date coinciding almost exactly with the spring equinox. At the same time the constellation of the bull would have appeared fully in the sky, stretched out below the stars. Perhaps the ancients used this regular pattern to mark the changing of the seasons, to know when the hunting would be good and when to prepare for the coming of winter.

We do not know if this was really the case. After all, there is no one to ask, and six dots painted on the wall of a cave is not a lot to go on. But we do know later people used the Pleiades, along with the bright star Sirius, to chart the seasons with accuracy.

This works because, over a human lifespan at least, the stars appear fixed on a celestial sphere. Over the course of a year they appear to rotate around the Earth. For a few weeks, then, they can disappear, hidden behind the bright light of the Sun. When they reappear they will rise in the moments before dawn - an event astronomers call the heliacal rising of a star.

This event, since the stars do not move, occurs on more or less the same date every year. In a society that has no other way of keeping track of time - no written calendars or clocks - watching for the heliacal rising of a few known bright stars is a good way of charting the flow of time.

In Egypt, twelve millennia after the paintings of Lascaux, this trick was used to monitor the flooding of the Nile. The heliacal rising of Sirius, the brightest star of the sky, then took place on July 15th. The floods of the Nile would reach their peak a few days after, and so the rising of Sirius was a reassuring sign for the agriculture and survival of the ancient Egyptians.

Is it any wonder, then, that we began to celebrate festivals on the coming of the stars, and began to think of them as Gods? The Egyptians celebrated their New Year on the day Sirius rose; today, five thousand years later, our New Year coincides with the time when Sirius reaches a zenith in the sky.

Over long periods of time, of course, the stars are not fixed. Sirius now rises in August, not July, and so it is today a bad marker of the coming floods. Seventeen thousand years ago the zenith of the Pleiades indicated the spring equinox; now it comes in November. This long change is thanks to a slow wobble in the Earth’s axis; a pattern that repeats over twenty-six millennia.

Still, these shifts are slow. Human lives are too short to notice them, and the ancients may not have realised the stars were slowly drifting. And neither does nature offer many other ways to accurately track the passage of time. The use of the Pleiades and Sirius as calendars may well have been one of our earliest discoveries - and, along with the use of fire, the start of our mastery of the natural world.

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III. The Lost Sister

But why did the ancients think of the Pleiades as seven stars, instead of the six that are clearly visible?

One explanation is simple: there are indeed more stars there, even if most of us cannot see them. In ancient Greece, the Pleiades were sometimes used as a test of eyesight - those that could pick out seven or eight stars had keener sight than most. Perhaps that’s why the seventh sister is missing - or, possibly, just fading from sight.

Some have argued that one of the hidden stars may once have been brighter. Stars do change in brightness over time, and it would not be impossible for one of the Pleiades to have faded away in the past few thousand years. Tales of the stars - which often tell of a lost sister - might reference this long ago disappearance. Yet there are no obvious signs of such a variation in the Pleiades, and no real evidence that one has faded.

The thread runs a little deeper, too. Myths of the Pleiades are remarkably similar across the world. People separated by oceans and gulfs of time all recognise them as sisters. Why sisters? Why not seven birds flying away into the night? Or seven canoes, sailing in advance of Orion, the hunter? And why are the sisters so often fleeing from peril?

Perhaps, a paper by two researchers of Aboriginal astronomy muses, these stories are memories of a time long ago. Just as the Earth moves, creating a long slow wobble in the seasons, so do the stars themselves. Over great stretches of time their positions shift and the constellations change.

Over the past hundred thousand years, then, two of the Pleiades - Atlas and Pleione - have moved closer together. Today they appear so close that the human eye cannot distinguish them, making them appear as a single bright star. But tens of millennia ago they would have appeared as two stars. To our deep ancestors, the Pleiades really were seven stars.

It could be, then, that the tale of the seven sisters is a relic from the deep past of humanity. A tale that has survived, in the form of myth and legend, handed down from mother to son, from generation to generation, since a time before we left our ancestral home.

1. In truth we don't know for sure this was how the Pleiades formed. Molecular clouds can also collapse when they collide, or simply when they grow too big.