Entity
Electra
In Greek myth, one of the seven Pleiades — daughters of Atlas set among the stars — and most often named as the "lost" or dimmed seventh of their cluster.
Electra is, in Greek myth, one of the Pleiades: the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione, placed among the stars as the small clustered group that still bears their name. The myth and the constellation are bound together from the start — the sisters are at once persons in a story and the points of light a Mediterranean year was measured by, their rising and setting marking the seasons for sailing and for harvest.
The genealogies make Electra a mother of cities. By Zeus she bore Dardanus, reckoned the founder of the Trojan line, and through him the myth threads forward into the matter of Troy; some sources give her Iasion as well, and the island of Samothrace as the seat of her offspring. This is the territory of legend rather than record: the names and descents vary from poet to poet, and the function of such a figure in the ancient texts is genealogical, a hinge by which later peoples traced themselves back to the gods.
What attaches most durably to Electra is a piece of stargazing folded into story. The cluster shows six stars readily to the unaided eye, though it is called seven; ancient writers explained the discrepancy by saying one sister had withdrawn. In one telling she is the dimmed or vanished Pleiad who could not bear to watch the fall of Troy, the city of her descendants, and veiled herself or left her place in the sky. The tradition of the “lost Pleiad” recurs in Greek and Roman authors and is the detail most often hung on her name; that several different sisters are named as the missing one, in different sources, is itself a mark of how loosely the story sat.
The name is shared, which has long invited confusion. A separate Electra appears among the Oceanids — wife of Thaumas, mother of the rainbow-goddess Iris and of the Harpies — and a third, unrelated Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, stands at the center of the Athenian tragic stage. The Pleiad is the astral one, and it is in that register that she travels furthest: the Pleiades were watched, named, and storied across many ancient cultures, and the Greek account of seven sisters with one gone faint is one local version of a far older human attention to that particular smudge of stars.
For later esoteric and astrological writing, the Pleiades carry weight as a named asterism with an ancient mythic charge, and Electra figures there as one of the seven; but the substance of her, in the sources that first record her, remains slight — a mother in a genealogy and an explanation for a star that the eye cannot quite find.