So while Daddy Atlas was too busy holding up the cosmos to stand on his crooked porch with the twelve gauge, Orion the great hunter set eyes on the Pleiades gals and decided to follow a new quarry. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than Orion expected, and after seven frustrating years of pursuit his lust remained unsatisfied. In some mythological genealogies Atlas and Orion are related, which suggests that Orion wasn’t above cruising for chicks at the family reunion (in most old European languages, the Pleiades were indeed called “the chicks”). Tired of fielding complaints from the harried Pleiades maidens and their kin, Zeus finally agreed to perform an Olympian feat of astromorphosis: he turned the seven sisters into doves and placed them in the sky, where they had good reason to suppose they would be free from sexual harassment. So much for that; later, when Orion was killed, Zeus placed him in the heavens just east of the sisters, where he might pursue them across the wheeling night for all eternity.
The word Pleiades, a Greek name lovely to both eye and ear, has a mysterious etymology. A likely origin is plein, which means “to sail.” Scientifically speaking, because Pleiades is a cluster, its member stars do sail across the wine-dark ocean of space together, as the unrelated stars of most constellations and asterisms do not. The more direct connotation of sailing, though, is hinted at by the ancient Greek nickname for the Pleiades: “Sailors’ Stars.” The cluster’s conjunction with the sun in spring and opposition with the sun in fall marked the opening and closing of the season for safe sailing in the ancient Mediterranean world. Around 700 B.C. the Greek poet Hesiod included this lyrical admonition in his “Works and Days”:
And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
Hesiod well knew the winds of trade and adventure that drove Greek ships and Greek ambition, but he also knew that to sail after the heliacal setting of the Pleiades was to risk a permanent visit to Poseidon’s coral caves. Our limits are written in the stars, he seems to say: know the time to plow the earth and not the waves, planting spring’s hope in soil and not upon the furrows of the deep.
But the word Pleiades may instead be derived from pleos, meaning “full,” which perhaps alludes to the wind-filled sails of Aegean summer but suggests other meanings as well. The plural of pleos means “many,” an apt description of the cluster’s stars. Or perhaps the name is derived matriarchally, from Pleione, the mythological sea nymph who is mother to the Seven Sisters and whose own name means “to increase in numbers.” But the etymology most consistent with the mythic astromorphosis of the sisters comes from peleiades, which means “flock of doves.” Although some believe this derivation to be merely poetic, having perhaps originated with the ancient Greek poet Pindar, many etymologists maintain that the literal meaning of Pleiades is “constellation of the doves.” The only certainty is that the origin of this name has vanished into the dark ocean of time. Pleiades stands as a lovely marker of a harbor now lost, a lyrical name that remains unmoored and sailing.
I spin for Hannah the yarn of the seven dove sisters, and she performs morphoses of her own, changing them into the ravens and meadowlarks who are her neighbors, and then into girls, and back into stars once more. She also changes the Pleiadian doves into her own sisters, whom she plans to visit up in the sky whenever she pleases. Narratives of sisterly bonds have special appeal for Hannah these days, because she knows that her mommy now carries within her a five-month-old fetus—a little sister who, on the ultrasound’s photograph of galactic inner space, appears gently lit and curved, a crescent moon floating in a dark sky of amniotic fluid. The magic of transformation is closer to Hannah’s reality than mine, a fact made plain by her fluidity in imagining and describing transformations of all kinds: in herself and her unborn sister, in her nonhuman neighbors, in the night sky. On the mountain behind our house, she tells me, pronghorn drink together at the same springs with a local dinosaur she has imagined and named Braucus. She’s certain that pronghorn and plesiosaurs sleep in the same caves, have breakfast together, even go to the same birthday parties wearing homemade garlands of lupine, sidalcea, and balsamroot flowers. The walls of the world—the ones that delineate the boxes within boxes where we grown-ups live and work—are invisible to her. For Hannah, the net of relations that makes the universe cohere is as interstitial as it is connective: strong and flexible, but full of inviting passages between worlds and permeable in ways that have long since been lost to me.
I tell Hannah about the science of the Pleiades as well as their mythology, but to her these two modes of perception offer equally compelling explanations for something she experiences in a relatively unmediated way. Orbital gravity, escape velocity, open cluster, reflection nebulae—that story is fine with her. Seven sisters who, while their daddy tries to hold up the world, become doves in the night sky—that makes perfect sense, too. Hannah loves stories, but behind the stories she sees only the world, just as it is, entirely full of possibility, every night when the light of the sun goes out.
Many ancient Greek temples, including the celebrated Parthenon, were constructed precisely so as to align with the heliacal rising or setting of the Pleiades. By orienting their temples in this way the Greeks were also orienting themselves within a universe in which this tiny, dipper-shaped net of stars formed the hub. The Seven Sisters are vitally important to ancient Greek culture—they figure in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other foundational Greek texts—and their beauty is also sung by the Romans, including Cicero, Ovid, Varro, Pliny, and Virgil. But the delicate beauty of the cluster, its visibility from both hemispheres, and its importance in marking the seasons of navigation and agriculture have given it prominence in cosmologies and agricultural calendars from around the planet.
In many ancient cultures the Pleiades cluster was considered the axis mundi—the hub of the universe, around which all else revolves. In ancient Arabic cultures the cluster was known as Al Na’ir (“the bright one”), and in ancient Egypt the ritual of the dead included speaking the names of the seven Hathors—the Pleiades—to assist the dead on their journey to the distant stars. In Hindu mythology the Pleiades stars were called the Krittika (Sanskrit for “the cutters”), the seven daughters of Brahma who married the Seven Rishis, or Seven Sages. The skilled sailors of ancient Polynesia celebrated these “highborn” stars as crucial navigational guides whose arrival initiated their new year. The Chaldeans called the cluster Chimah, meaning “hinge,” because it was thought to be the point upon which the universe pivots. In China this cluster of “Blossom Stars” was recorded in a 2357 B.C. reference, which may be the first in astronomical literature. The indigenous Ainu people of Japan saw not a blossom but instead a great tortoise that they called Subaru, a designation we still see on the six-star logo of the automotive conglomerate that borrowed its name from the Pleiades. To the Maori of New Zealand the Pleiades are Matariki, the beloved “little eyes of heaven.” Among the aboriginal peoples of Australia, who believe the Seven Sisters came to earth from the celestial sphere during the ancient Dreamtime, each tribe calls the cluster by its own name: to the Kulin people the Pleiades were Karagurk; to the Adnyamathanha, Magara; to the Bundjalung, Meamai; and to the Walmadjeri, Gungaguranggara.
I can also tell Hannah stories that are closer to home, since most of the indigenous peoples of North America have rich cultural connections to the Pleiades. The Navajo, who called the cluster Dilyehe, claimed that these special stars were placed in the heavens by the Fire God. The Blackfeet have a myth of lost children who eventually find safety in the sky, and the Lakota believed that after death one’s soul returns to the Pleiades. The Wyandot tell a story of seven girls who fly up to the star cluster in a big basket, in part to escape an amorous hunter. The Hopi called the Pleiades the Chuhukon (“those who
cling together”) and considered themselves descended from these stars, while Cree myths claim that protohumans came to earth from the Pleiades in spirit form before becoming corporeal bodies here. The Iroquois performed a prayer to the Seven Sisters, while Dakota myths relate that the home of the ancestors was among the Pleiades.
Hannah’s favorite of these many wonderful stories, which is shared by the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Lakota, and our own local Shoshone peoples, closely links the Pleiades to Devils Tower (in Lakota, Mathó Thípila, which means “Bear Lodge”), a sacred site in present-day northeastern Wyoming that functions as the axis mundi within several Native American cosmographies. Seven Indian girls who were fleeing a great bear climbed to the top of the volcanic tower and prayed to the Great Spirit for help, after which the tower magically soared upward until the girls were delivered into the heavens for their protection. Once her little sister is born, Hannah tells me, she hopes the two of them can visit the top of that tower, just to see how close they can get to the stars.
The Pleiades were also used to calibrate many ancient agricultural and sacred calendars, and festivals devised to honor the Seven Sisters have even survived into our own day. The Aztecs based their famous calendar on the Pleiades, whose heliacal rising, ritually marked by priests, began their calendrical year. At Cusco, the capital of the ancient Incan empire, the 328-night year also began with the celebrated vernal rising of the Sisters. The Mayan sacred calendar, the Tzolk’in, describes a 26,000-year period and is likewise based upon the cycles of the Pleiades. And throughout much of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica there was, every fifty-two years, a monumental celebration when the Pleiades culminated (reached their highest point in the sky) just at midnight. In both spatial and temporal terms, these ancient cultures located themselves in the universe by calculating their relationship to the sacred star cluster.
Because the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in spring coincides with the life-giving season of new growth, many ancient traditions associate the cluster with fertility and plenitude. But the cycles of the Pleiades have also marked the end of seasons and the end of life itself. In old Europe the cluster was powerfully associated with mourning because its acronychal rising (rising in the east just as the sun sets in the west) occurred on the cross-quarter day between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice and thus marked All Hallows’ Eve, the feast of the dead that was later Christianized as All Saints’ Day and eventually secularized as Halloween. Traced back far enough, Halloween leads to the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain, which was also calibrated to the midnight culmination of the Pleiades. In fact, the two prominent cross-quarter times in the old Dorian calendar were both marked by the Pleiades, and they evolved into May Day and Halloween, those vital pagan celebrations of life and death. The Pleiades are thus an illuminated bridge between ourselves and our ancestors. When little Hannah dons her Halloween butterfly costume and completes her metamorphosis from girl into butterfly, she is actually participating in an ancient ritual of death and rebirth that has for millennia been marked by the movement of her favorite stars.
Given that astral worship was one of the forms of pagan idolatry against which the ancient Hebrews defined their faith, it is fascinating that the Old Testament—a book not rich in stars—contains explicit references to the Pleiades. Both are in the Book of Job, and both are assertions of God’s authority as supreme creator of heaven and earth. Job’s problem is that, like Hannah, he asks a lot of questions. In Job 38:31–33, the Old Testament God—who is master of, among other things, the high-stakes rhetorical question—asks Job the sort of question one had better answer correctly: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” The correct answer, of course, is “No way, boss.” Job’s inability to govern the stars defines the limit of his mortal gifts, for only omniscient God can penetrate the nebular veil shrouding the Seven Sisters. Like Job, Hannah and I must get along as best we can, asking much but understanding little.
Among the innumerable myths about the Pleiades are many that attempt to account for the “Lost Pleiad”—that missing seventh sister we so seldom see when gazing skyward at night. Some say that Merope, having married the mortal Sisyphus, went dim with shame. Others claim that it is Electra, who in mourning hid her bright face in grief upon the death of her son, Dardanus. Scientists tend to identify the missing Pleiad as Celaeno because it is the dimmest of the seven stars and just at the limit of human vision. But even here there is uncertainty, for the fluctuations in apparent magnitude that occur over time in these stars may mean that the ancients saw a brighter seventh sister than we see today. I do not know which Pleiad is the lost sister. In one story I often tell Hannah, she herself is the seventh sister, now invisible in the sky because she descended to earth to become part of our family. She likes that story, and whenever I tell it she smiles and sings an incisive line of verse: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”
The myth of the lost Pleiad has more serious implications in our own day, for now all seven sisters are in danger of becoming lost. Because the Pleiades stars are barely visible, even moderate levels of human-generated light in the night sky wash them away as if they had never existed. Insofar as our visceral experience of them is concerned, these stars are critically endangered. If the light of the Pleiadian doves is extinguished, it will not be the same kind of extinction suffered by the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet—but it will be extinction nonetheless. When I crest the last dark desert ridge before entering the city, I see in the southern sky the shining stars of Orion’s belt. But above and to the right of the hunter I see nothing—the sisters are lost in the hazy glow of city lights, and where there should be beauty there is instead a hole in the sky. I know that beyond the cloud of light generated by the Walmart and its satellites floats a delicate net of exquisite stars that has played a vital role in human culture for millennia, but this abstract knowledge cannot substitute for the experience of seeing the sisters for myself.
When the pagans celebrated feasts to honor the Pleiades, they first extinguished every fire in the land so as to better view the Seven Sisters ignited in the heavens. Our age, too, must find some ritual to honor the stars, for darkness is the only mother from which starlight can be born. Modern connotations of the word benighted are strictly pejorative: “to be unenlightened; involved in intellectual or moral darkness.” But the word’s archaic meaning sings a different tune: “to be overtaken or affected by the darkness of the night.” We cannot be enlightened without first becoming benighted. In Nature Emerson tried to rekindle in his readers the miraculous wonder of stargazing: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance.” What new myth can inspire us to restore the darkness that now lies hidden beneath the bright map of America?
How long will my little daughter continue to check nightly for the Pleiades if the light spewing from the sprawling city sends the other six stars into exile with their seventh sister? How can we measure what is lost when something that connects us viscerally to the universe simply ceases to be part of our sensory experience? I wonder what will have vanished when the nebulous glow of this celebrated cluster recedes, leaving only a blank spot on Hannah’s treasure map of night. I have no way of knowing how the woman she grows to become will have been enriched by the presence of her sisterly stars or, conversely, impoverished by their silent vanishing into the artificially illuminated night. I do know that Hannah cannot bear the thought of her own little sister being born into a world from which the light of the lovely Pleiadian sister doves has been exiled.
PART TWO
Wilding
Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight. I like to imagine a “depth ecology” that would go to the dark side of nature—the ball of crunched bones in a scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable appetite.
—GARY SNYDER, The Practice of the Wild
Chapter 5
5. The Adventures of Peavine and Charlie
Late one summer afternoon, while out for a walk, Hannah and I decide to follow some pronghorn tracks, just for practice. Tracks, as Hannah knows, are story. To follow a track is to pursue a single story line through a palimpsest landscape, a richly imbricated world of interlacing narrative possibilities, the ultimate hypertext. How fast is the animal moving, in what direction, and for what purpose? Where does it pause to rest or forage? Why is it here at this time of year and this time of day? Where is it coming from, and where is it going? The pronghorn’s trail intersects with those of jackrabbit and coyote, kangaroo rat and quail, father and little girl; its story unfolds in a particular place at a specific time and for certain reasons, only some of which are discernible by us. We engage with this text because we relish the language of hoofprint and fur tuft and scat in which it is told, but also because, like all readers, we crave narrative resolution.
After we have followed the antelope trail for a few hundred yards, Hannah asks, “Dad, what’s at the end of these tracks?”
“A pronghorn,” I reply.
“How do you know?” she insists.
“I can’t be sure, but that’s what I believe.”
“OK,” she says, “let’s keep going until we find it.” We follow the dual crescent moons of the socketed hoofprints another hundred yards until they crest a rise, from which we look down and see a large pronghorn buck looking up at us. “Dad, just like you said!” Hannah whispers excitedly. It is as if, in turning the pages of an autobiography, we have somehow read our way up to the author as he sits at the desk, writing.
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