The legend of Mara-riki

We denizens of the 21st cen­tury tend to look at the sky with a sci­en­tific eye, and, of course, there’s noth­ing wrong with that.

We know the stars are giant hydro­gen bombs. We see the con­stel­la­tions as use­ful con­ve­niences to learn the sky. We are begin­ning to for­get that humans used to tell sto­ries about the stars — that our rela­tion­ship with the starry vault was once per­sonal and not pedantic.

We must lis­ten to every­thing the stars tell us if we are to dis­cover who we really are in this vast and glo­ri­ous cos­mos. We must open up our hearts as well as our minds. And we must remem­ber that human­ity is a fam­ily made up of many chil­dren, each of which has value, each of which has some­thing to say.

Thus, this week we look not to our west­ern tra­di­tions about the stars but to an old Poly­ne­sian tale about the most beau­ti­ful of star clus­ters, what we west­ern­ers call the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters.

Look for it high in the south around 8 p.m. as a tiny, dipper-shaped col­lec­tion of six stars eas­ily vis­i­ble to the unaided eye. They can be found up and to the right from the V-shaped head of Tau­rus, the Bull. The left-most star of the Bull’s head is another char­ac­ter in our story. Alde­baran, the angry red eye of the Bull, is the dom­i­nant star in the region.

It was not always so. Accord­ing to the old Poly­ne­sian story, near Alde­baran was a star so supremely bright that it out­shone even Sir­ius, the bright­est star in our con­tem­po­rary sky. Bril­liant Sir­ius, yet another char­ac­ter in the tale, can be found far down and to the left from Alde­baran on the other side of the famil­iar con­stel­la­tion Orion.

Long before humans made their appear­ance on Earth, that bright­est of all stars was called Mara-riki, or Lit­tle Eyes. So enam­ored was it of its own beauty that it began to boast to nearby stars that it was more lovely even than the gods them­selves. The gods did not take Mara-riki’s van­ity well. They appointed Tane, guardian of the four pil­lars of heaven, to drive Lit­tle Eyes from the starry sky.

Real­iz­ing that van­ity was not the sin­gu­lar purview of the bright­est of stars, Tane asked the nearby bright stars Sir­ius and Alde­baran for their help. The two stars had always been jeal­ous of Mara-riki’s bril­liance, so they par­tic­i­pated quite will­ingly in the conspiracy.

Together, the three headed for their brighter enemy, but it saw them com­ing and hid under the waters of the heav­enly river we call the Milky Way. Sir­ius, whose bril­liance extended to an agile mind, quickly dammed the great river of light. Thus revealed, Mara-riki ran away so fast that it began to dis­ap­pear in the distance.

The pow­er­ful Tane picked up Alde­baran, and with a mighty throw hit the unfor­tu­nate fugi­tive. The blow was so enor­mous that it smashed Mara-riki into six dim­mer pieces.

Frag­mented and in pain, the six stars limped their way back to where the brighter star had once been located, near to the now brighter star Alde­baran. No longer do they out­shine the Bull’s angry eye. Now Sir­ius reigns supreme as the bright­est star in the dark bowl of night.

You’d think that the for­merly bril­liant Mara-riki would have learned some­thing from these events. Pride, after all, to our west­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties “goeth before a fall.” It’s pretty tough to go from the bright­est bulb in the cos­mos to a scat­tered, lit­tle clus­ter of stars. Wouldn’t most of us be deeply despon­dent over these events?

Per­haps, but indomitable van­ity is also some­thing to admire. To this very day, Mara-riki still occa­sion­ally looks down with its six eyes upon its reflec­tion in the ocean waters and whis­pers to itself that it is far love­lier as the glo­ri­ous Pleiades than it ever was as a mere star. If you ever see those Lit­tle Eyes reflected in your own, you will know exactly what it means.

Tom Burns is direc­tor of Ohio Wes­leyan University’s Perkins Obser­va­tory in Delaware. He can be reached at tlburns@owu.edu.

Posted by Tom Burns on Feb 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.