Pleiades

The Pleiades (PLY-uh-deez), in Greek the Πλειάδες, are the seven sister-nymphs who became the small, close-clustered group of stars that still bears their name — the "Seven Sisters" of the night sky. They are the daughters of the Titan Atlas, who bears the heavens on his shoulders, and of the Oceanid Pleione, and from their parents they take their two great names: the Atlantides, "daughters of Atlas," and the Pleiades, "daughters of Pleione." Their half-sisters, born of the same father by the same mother, are the Hyades, another star-cluster close by; and the two groups of star-sisters are often named in the same breath.

The seven are Maia the eldest, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope (also called Asterope), and Merope the youngest. Several of them became the mothers of gods and heroes, for the great Olympians sought them out: Maia bore Hermes to Zeus (her story is told on her own page), Electra bore Dardanus, the founder of the royal line of Troy, and Taygete gave her name to a Spartan mountain and her son Lacedaemon to the city of Sparta. As mothers of founders and kings they stand near the root of many of the oldest Greek and Trojan genealogies — nymphs of mountain and spring who married gods and mortals and seeded the map of the heroic world.

But it is as stars that everyone remembers them. The myth tells that the giant hunter Orion pursued the seven sisters across the earth for seven long years, until in pity the gods snatched them up into the sky and set them among the constellations — where Orion still follows them across the heavens, the hunter forever a little behind his quarry. There the Greeks read them as a calendar: the dawn rising of the Pleiades in May opened the season of sailing and of harvest, and their setting in autumn closed it and called the farmer to plough. And there hangs the sky's oldest riddle — that seven sisters were set among the stars, but only six shine plainly to the eye. This page tells the seven together, as the ancients did, and follows the "Lost Pleiad" into the dark.

Daughters of Atlas and Pleione

The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas — the sky-bearer, son of Iapetus, condemned after the Titans' defeat to hold the heavens forever on his shoulders — and of the Oceanid Pleione, a daughter of Ocean and Tethys who was reckoned a protectress of sailors. From their father they are the Atlantides, and by the same father and mother they are full sisters to the Hyades, the rainy star-cluster, and (in many accounts) to the solitary nymph Calypso and to the ill-fated Hyas whose death gave the Hyades their name. Their mother's name gives them their own: Pleiades, "the daughters of Pleione." Born on the slopes of a mountain — Cyllene in Arcadia in the oldest telling, where their eldest, Maia, would bear Hermes — they are nymphs of the wild high country before they are stars, and it is as nymphs pursued through that country that their great myth begins.

The seven sisters, each by name

The canonical list of the seven, given by Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.10.1) and by the astronomical handbooks, runs: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope — and to each the genealogists attached a line of descent, so that the seven stars are also seven founding-mothers. Maia, the eldest and most beautiful, lay with Zeus in the cave of Cyllene and bore Hermes, the messenger-god (her story is told on her own page). Electra ("the amber one," "the bright") lay with Zeus and bore Dardanus, who crossed the sea to the Troad and founded the royal house of Troy — so that the Trojan kings, down to Priam, traced their blood to a Pleiad — and also Iasion, beloved of Demeter. Taygete lay with Zeus and bore Lacedaemon, the eponymous founder of Sparta; the great mountain that walls Sparta to the west, Mount Taygetus, carries her name. Alcyone lay with Poseidon and bore Hyrieus (father of Orion, in one tangled strand) and other sons who founded cities in Boeotia. Celaeno ("the dark one") also lay with Poseidon and bore Lycus and Nycteus. Sterope (or Asterope, "star-face") was said by some to have borne Oenomaus, the cruel king of Pisa, to Ares. And Merope, the youngest, alone married a mortal man — Sisyphus, king of Corinth, the great trickster — and for that lesser marriage, the poets said, her star shines dimmest of the seven, or hides altogether. Between them the seven sisters gave children to Zeus, Poseidon, and Ares, and mortal husbands besides: a spread of divine and royal parentage that made the Pleiades the ancestresses of half the heroic world.

Orion's pursuit and the flight into the stars

Their defining story is the catasterism — the passage from earth into the sky. The giant huntsman Orion, most beautiful and most violent of men, saw the seven sisters (in some tellings with their mother Pleione, journeying through Boeotia) and was seized with desire for them; and he pursued them, relentlessly, across the length of the earth. For seven years the sisters fled and Orion followed, never catching them and never giving up the chase, until at last the sisters — or their mother for them — cried out to Zeus for release. In pity the god snatched all seven up from the earth and set them among the stars as the cluster we call the Pleiades, and Orion too was set in the sky as the great constellation that bears his name. But the placing keeps the chase alive: Orion still follows the Pleiades across the heavens, rising behind them and setting behind them, the hunter forever a stride behind the doves he can never reach. The poets even called the seven sisters peleiades, "doves," and so the whole picture resolves into a flock of wild doves fleeing forever before the hunter, all of them fixed now in the turning sky. Nearby in the heavens their father Atlas stands (some saw the neighbouring stars as the sky-bearer), and close beside them glitter the Hyades, their half-sisters, so that the family that was scattered on earth is gathered together at last among the constellations.

The Lost Pleiad — why the eye sees only six

Here lies the sky's oldest puzzle, and the Greeks explained it with one of their most poignant myths. The unaided eye, on a clear night, makes out only six stars in the cluster, though the tradition insisted there were seven sisters — and so the Greeks spoke of the "Lost Pleiad," the seventh who fled from sight. Two sisters are named as the vanished one. Most often it is Merope, the youngest, who dimmed her star and hid her face for shame — because she alone had stooped to marry a mortal, Sisyphus, while her sisters lay with gods; ashamed among her shining sisters, she veils herself and will not fully show. In the other telling it is Electra who is lost, and hers is a grief and not a shame: she was the mother of Dardanus, ancestor of Troy, and when Troy fell and the city of her blood was destroyed, Electra could not bear to watch, and drew her light away, covering her face in mourning — some said she left the cluster altogether to wander the sky as a comet, "the star with unbound hair." Either way, the myth turns an astronomical fact — that the seventh star is faint and hard to see — into a story of a sister who hides: for shame of a mortal marriage, or for grief at the burning of Troy. The Lost Pleiad is one of the loveliest examples of the Greek habit of reading the sky as a book of feeling.

The star-clock of farmer and sailor

Long before they were a story, the Pleiades were a calendar — perhaps the single most important star-marker of the ancient agricultural and seafaring year, because the small bright cluster is easy to find and its risings and settings fall at just the turns of the season that matter most. Hesiod builds the working year of the Works and Days around them: "When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are setting" (383–384) — that is, their first dawn rising in mid-May told the farmer to reap the ripe grain, and their dawn setting in early November told him to plough and sow for the next year. For the sailor they were the same clock: Hesiod warns (619–620) that when the Pleiades, "fleeing the mighty strength of Orion," plunge into the misty sea — their setting — the sailing season is over and the winter storms are coming, and a prudent man draws his ship up onto the land and waits. Their spring rising opened the sea to shipping; their autumn setting closed it. So the two halves of their myth answer each other exactly: the sisters who flee Orion through the story are the same stars that, "fleeing Orion," sink into the sea to end the sailing year. The Pleiades were the hinge of the working calendar of the whole ancient Mediterranean — the star-clock by which a world without almanacs knew when to sail, when to reap, and when to plough.

Nymphs of the sky, honoured in the calendar

The Pleiades had little in the way of formal, altar-based cult of their own — they were nymphs and stars rather than Olympian gods to be petitioned — but they were woven so deeply into the practical and religious life of the ancient world that their "worship" is better understood as their constant use. As the great seasonal markers of the agricultural year, their risings and settings governed the rhythm of festivals, sowings, and harvests across Greece; to watch for the Pleiades and time one's labour by them was itself a kind of piety, an attention to the order the gods had written in the sky. Hesiod's whole farmer's almanac is built on them, and behind the practical instruction lies a religious sense that the seasons are divinely appointed and the stars are their appointed signs.

Star-sisters in genealogy and local cult

Where the Pleiades were honoured as figures, it was usually through their children and the cities that claimed descent from them. Taygete was remembered in Laconia, where Mount Taygetus bore her name and where she was linked to the cult of Artemis (to whom, one story said, she fled for refuge from Zeus); the Spartans traced their founder Lacedaemon to her. Electra was honoured wherever the Trojan and Samothracian lines that sprang from her son Dardanus were remembered, and she was drawn into the mysteries of Samothrace as a mother-figure of the island's sacred kings. Maia, the eldest, received honour as the mother of Hermes — her name became a title of a nurturing goddess and, through the Roman calendar, was attached to the month of May (Maius). So the Pleiades were venerated less at shrines of their own than as the divine ancestresses standing at the head of the genealogies of Sparta, Troy, Boeotia, and Arcadia — the star-mothers of the founding houses.

Reading the sky as sacred sign

Above all the Pleiades belonged to the ancient discipline of watching the heavens. Their heliacal rising (the first dawn on which the cluster becomes visible again before sunrise, after weeks lost in the sun's glare) and their setting were noted and named across the Greek and Roman world, and used to fix the dates of the sailing season, the harvest, and many a local festival. To know the Pleiades was part of the shared inheritance of farmer, sailor, and priest alike; and the small, faint, unmistakable cluster — easy to find, hard to count — kept its hold on the religious imagination precisely because it sat at the crossing of the practical and the mysterious, a clock and a riddle at once.

The Seven Sisters, still overhead

The Pleiades are among the very few figures of Greek myth that anyone can still go outside and see. The cluster the Greeks named for the seven sisters is a real and beautiful object — a knot of hot young blue stars in the constellation Taurus, one of the nearest and most conspicuous star-clusters to Earth — and it still carries the name "the Pleiades" or "the Seven Sisters" in English astronomy, with the individual stars formally named Alcyone, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope after the sisters, together with Atlas and Pleione for their parents. The ancient riddle survives in the fact that most people can pick out only six stars with the naked eye; the "Lost Pleiad" is now a piece of folklore attached to a genuine observation, and skywatchers still repeat the old stories of Merope's shame or Electra's grief to explain the missing seventh.

A calendar older than the calendar

What the Pleiades meant to Hesiod's farmer they have meant to peoples all over the world, and often still do: because the cluster's risings and settings fall at seasonally useful moments, cultures across the globe have independently used it as a seasonal and agricultural marker and as the anchor of festivals. In the modern Hellenic and broader Pagan revival, the Pleiades are honoured in this old key — as the star-clock of the turning year, their spring rising greeted as the opening of the warm season and their autumn setting marking its close — and as the seven nymph-daughters of Atlas whose names still hang in the sky. A devotee might simply go out on an autumn or winter night, find the little misty cluster high in the east, and remember the seven sisters and the hunter who follows them still.

The doves in art, poetry, and the wider sky

The Pleiades have never left Western art and letters: they glimmer through poetry from Sappho — who watched "the moon has set, and the Pleiades" as she lay awake alone — to Tennyson, who saw them "rising through the mellow shade... glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." Their name has been given to poets (the Pléiade of Renaissance France, the seven-star grouping of Alexandrian tragedians), to a Japanese automobile marque (Subaru, the Japanese name for the same cluster, whose badge shows the six visible stars), and to countless ships, telescopes, and observatories. The seven sisters and the hunter who pursues them remain, as they were for Homer and Hesiod, among the first constellations a person learns to name — the doves fleeing across the sky, the calendar of the ancient year, and the tender riddle of the star that hides.