What happened to the Seventh Sister?

Among the great mys­ter­ies of the night­time sky, none has cap­tured human imag­i­na­tion more than the one asso­ci­ated with the clus­ter of stars called the Pleiades, or Seven Sis­ters. Look for the clus­ter high in the ESE as a small, dipper-shaped col­lec­tion of sev­eral stars above the bright star Alde­baran in the con­stel­la­tion Tau­rus, the Bull. While you’re at it, check out bright Jupiter to the left of Aldebaran.

More sto­ries have been told about the Pleiades in more ancient cul­tures than any other object. Why? The Seven Sis­ters has only six stars in it.

The mys­tery is truly an ancient one. The sto­ries explain­ing the miss­ing star are thou­sands of years old.

The Greeks iden­ti­fied the stars with seven beau­ti­ful sis­ters who loved to romp among a meadow full of spring flow­ers. Along came Orion, the pow­er­ful and rash hunter, who imme­di­ately pur­sued them with (ahem, how shall I put this) amorous intent. As they ran in ter­ror, the sis­ters prayed to the mighty Zeus, king of all the gods, to save them. Zeus turned them into a flock of doves, and they flew upward to take refuge among the stars.

They alit on the back of Tau­rus, the Bull, who pro­vides pro­tec­tion from Orion to this very day. As fall turns to win­ter, the Pleiades rise first and after them the Bull. Ris­ing last is Orion, who seems to bat­tle the Bull, his club raised high, in order to blud­geon the beast to death so that he can gain access to the sisters.

The Greeks invented sev­eral other sto­ries to explain the miss­ing sis­ters. In one myth, she is Elec­tra, the mother of the founder of Troy, an ancient city burned to the ground by the ancient Greeks. She left her place in the sky because she could not bear to watch the destruc­tion of the city and could not find her way back.

An old Arab story tells of Alde­baran, the bright­est star in Tau­rus, who was rejected by one of the sis­ters because he was so poor. He left the sky to pur­sue his for­tune and became wealthy after long and ardu­ous labor. He returned to the sky dri­ving before him his herd of camels, which we see as the V-shaped clus­ter of stars called the Hyades, which form the head of Taurus.

How­ever, the beau­ti­ful sis­ter left the sky, no doubt fright­ened or infu­ri­ated by Aldebaran’s unwanted atten­tion. The miss­ing sis­ter remains in hid­ing, but Alde­baran and his camels are still there, hop­ing against hope for her return.

A Native Amer­i­can leg­end describes the Pleiades as seven chil­dren who joined hands every night to dance with joy under the stars. The stars learned to love and appre­ci­ate the chil­dren. One sea­son, the land was bar­ren and there was lit­tle for the peo­ple to eat. The chil­dren appeared under the stars, but they were too starved and near death to dance. In pity and admi­ra­tion, the stars invited the chil­dren to join them in the sky, and the dancers became the Pleiades.

Night after night, the chil­dren passed above the Earth they had loved so well. Night after night, they saw their friends and fam­ily mourn­ing the loss of the chil­dren, but noth­ing could be done. The chil­dren must remain stars for­ever. As time passed, one of the chil­dren became so home­sick that he wept bit­ter tears and hid his face in his hands. The child is incon­solable. His glow­ing face remains hid­den to this very day.

The peo­ple of Mon­go­lia say that the miss­ing star appears else­where in the sky as the star Alcor, the faint star near Mizar, the star at the bend of the han­dle of the Big Dip­per. In this story, Alcor is known as the Cold Star because it had been kid­napped from warmer regions to the south. The other stars of the Dip­per are known as “rob­ber stars,” proud of their bril­liance and anx­ious to add bright stars to their gang. On one raid, they car­ried one of the Pleiades back to their perch near Polaris, where it must shiver for­ever in the icy north.

Dur­ing the early his­tory of human­ity, seven stars must have been vis­i­ble in the Pleiades. At some point, one of the stars dimmed. Such was the impor­tance of the stel­lar group­ing to cul­tures around the globe that they made up sto­ries to explain the sev­enth star’s absence.

Tom Burns is the direc­tor of Perkins Obser­va­tory. He can be reached at tlburns@owu.edu.

Posted by Tom Burns on Nov 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.