The Pleiades

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The Pleiades are a compact cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus, visible to the unaided eye as a small knot of light in which most observers count six or seven points. Astronomically they are an open cluster of young, hot, blue stars roughly four hundred and forty light-years off — the distance is not fixed to a single figure — wrapped in a faint blue haze of reflected light. Few astronomical objects have gathered so much meaning. Across cultures with no contact between them, the same little cluster was watched, named, and woven into story, and its appearance and disappearance in the night sky were read as markers of time.

The familiar Western name comes from Greek myth, where the Pleiades are seven sisters, daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Most bore children to gods; Merope alone married a mortal, Sisyphus. The hunter Orion pursued them, and Zeus set them among the stars to escape him — so Orion, made a constellation too, still chases them across the sky. The faint or missing seventh has its own tradition, the “Lost Pleiad,” named variously as Merope, ashamed of her mortal match, or as Electra, who turned away in grief at the fall of Troy: an ancient answer to the plain fact that six, not seven, are easily seen.

The Greeks also used the cluster practically, and the poets recorded the use plainly. Hesiod’s Works and Days, around 700 BCE, keys the farming year to it: reap when the Pleiades rise at dawn, near May; plough when they set, toward November; between the two they lie “hidden forty nights and days.” The same lines mark the safe season for sailing. It is the clearest classical instance of the cluster as a working calendar. The reckoning was older and wider than Greece. In Mesopotamian star-lists the group is the Sumerian MUL.MUL, “the stars,” cataloged in the compendium MUL.APIN among the asterisms in the Moon’s path and used to keep the calendar true, the conjunction of Moon and Pleiades governing when a month was intercalated. The Hebrew scriptures name it too, as Kimah, “the cluster” — and three times, always paired with Orion: in Job 9:9 and 38:31, where God asks whether man can “bind the chains of the Pleiades,” and in Amos 5:8, an image of the order set into creation. Many farming peoples beyond these timed planting and harvest by when the cluster first cleared the horizon before sunrise.

What scholarship can establish is the spread of that attention, not a single source for it. The cluster is the Japanese Subaru, a name meaning roughly “gathered together” or “united.” For the Māori it is Matariki, “the eyes of the god Tāwhirimātea,” whose dawn rising in late June opens the new year — a time to mourn the dead, give thanks for the harvest, and feast; in 2022 it became an official New Zealand public holiday, set for 24 June, the first national holiday anywhere built on an indigenous celestial calendar. The Aztec called it Tianquiztli, “the marketplace,” and began their year at its rising before dawn; the Hopi knew it as Tsöötsöqam and timed winter rites by its passage seen through the opening of a kiva roof. In the songlines of Aboriginal Australia the cluster is again seven women, fleeing a man figured in Orion — a structural echo of the Greek chase striking enough that some have built an argument on it. It figures likewise in the sky-lore of Africa and of peoples across the wider Americas and Pacific, often tied to the seasons and sometimes to the count of seven. Why so many traditions settled on seven, when most eyes today see six, is an old puzzle; explanations range from keener ancient sight to a star that has since dimmed, and a newer one holds that the motion of the stars themselves is to blame — that Pleione has drifted so close to Atlas that the two now merge, where a hundred thousand years ago a seventh would have stood clear. None is secure.

The recurrence has drawn its own interpretations. Some have read it as evidence of a shared archaic astronomy carried with early human migrations; the astronomers Ray and Barnaby Norris have gone furthest, proposing that the seven-sisters and lost-Pleiad motifs may descend from a single ancestral story some hundred thousand years old, with the dimming of that seventh star a real sky-change remembered down the ages. The authors offer this as a hypothesis, and so it must be held. Others see independent responses to a striking object any sky-watcher would notice. That so many peoples settled on the same cluster, and often on the same count of seven, is striking; it falls well short of proving a shared source, since a bright cluster that signals the turn of the year is exactly the kind of thing widely separated peoples might each have found on their own. What the Pleiades reliably show is how readily the night sky was made to carry meaning, and how often the same patch of it was chosen to do so.

A separate and far younger stratum claims the cluster more literally. From the later twentieth century a strand of New Age esotericism has named the Pleiades as the home of benevolent extraterrestrials — often described as fair, “Nordic” in appearance — who are said to be in contact with chosen humans. The Swiss farmer Eduard “Billy” Meier claimed, from 1975, hundreds of meetings with “Plejaren” beings, producing photographs and thousands of pages of contact notes that circulated through the North American scene by the end of the decade. Barbara Marciniak, beginning in 1988, said she channeled a “collective from the Pleiades”; her Bringers of the Dawn, drawn from hours of trance sessions and published in 1992, became a landmark of the genre, presenting the Pleiadians as enlightened guides come to aid humanity’s passage to a higher state. These are claims under study, reported here as such — neither established nor dismissed. They form a modern overlay, distinct in kind and in age from the documented ethnoastronomy, and the two are best kept apart: the ancient record is of a sky watched and named, while the Pleiadian current is of a sky said to be answering back.

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