Where the Forest Murmurs,
Vol VI, by Fiona Macleod |
THE
PLEIAD-MONTH
From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll---in a
word, from the remote East to the remote West---November is known, in kindred phrase, as
the Pleiad Month.
What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance, centres in this
little group of stars. "The meeting-place in the skies of mythology and
science," as they have been called by one of our chief astronomers. From time
immemorial this remote starry cluster has been associated with festivals and solemnities,
with auguries and destinies. On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the
Pleiades, the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia, on that day,
no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings: and on the first of the month the
midnight rites of our own ancestral Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades.
To-day the South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by their
seaward rising and setting., The Matarii i nia, or season of the "Pleiades
Above," begins when in the evening this stellar group appears on the horizon, and
while they remain above it: the Matarii i raro, or season of the "Pleiades
Below," begins when after sunset they are no longer visible, and endures till once
again they appear above the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at
one in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged them as Flame,
typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the several Persian words, from the
ancient Perv or the Parur of Hafiz or the Parwin of Omar
Khayyam---derive from Peru, a word signifying "The Begetters"; and we
know that the Greeks oriented to them or to their lucida not only the first great
temple of Athenê on the Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the
Hecatompedon of 1150 B. C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same side.
[The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and
the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far
removed from these are the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely
revere "the central fires," and even so primitive and remote a people as the
Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great Spirit---Groaperikie,
or Grandfather---and chant hymns of joy to this Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal
Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more hangs visible in the northern sky.
It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of the nomenclature, of the
literature, of scientific knowledge and speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long
chapter in a book might be given to Alcyone alone---that bright particular star of which
it has been calculated that, in comparison, out Sun would sink to a star below the tenth
magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after the astronomer's calm march with
dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy
of the Pleiadic group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen therein
only a small cluster of tiny stars, the "seven" of Biblical and poetic and
legendary lore, from "the Seven Archangels" to the popular "Hen and her six
chicks." Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate heavens, is eighty-three times
more refulgent than that magnificent star Sirius, which has been called the "Glory of
the South": a thousand times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and
Taygeta, Celeno and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has been
calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and Electra about four hundred
and eighty times larger. When one thinks of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the
winged imagination can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail : at most one can but
recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, "Seek Him that maketh
Pleiades and Orion," or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, " O day star, son of
the morning."
A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under different
names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that
Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and
auginent rivers and feed the well-springs, and that Maia's breath falls in dew. The detail
is fanciful; the central thought is in, accord with legend and old wisdom. I do not know
how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water, particularly rains and the rising
of rivers, has been traced. It runs through many ancient records. True, in one place,
Hesiod speaks of "retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades," and mention
has already been made of the Hindu association of them with "Flame." But
Hesiod's allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in a warm country where
the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with days of sweltering closeness and heat.
Moreover, Hesiod himself uses equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him,
speaking of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with Pindar,
Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying from the Hunter Orion,
doubtless from earliest mention of them in ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds;
and again as "the Seven Virgins" and "the Virgin stars "---thus at one
with his contemporary, the Hebrew Herdsman---prophet Amos, who called them by a word
rendered in the Authorised Version of the Bible as "the seven stars." As for the
Hindu symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred and primitive
element, and that every begetter of life in any form would naturally be thus associate.
The Hindus called the Pleiad-Month (October-November) Kartik, and the reason of the
great star-festival Dibali, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy,
after the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of dry warmth and
beauty. The "sweet influences" of the Pleiades thus indicated will come more
familiarly to many readers in Milton's
"the
grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc'd,
Shedding sweet influence,
This ancient custom, the "Feast of Lamps," of the Western
Hindus survives to-day in the "Feast of Lanterns" in Japan, though few Europeans
seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.
In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent both in ancient and
modern tradition, with springs and rains and floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the
comment in the old Breeches Bible, opposite the mention of "the mystic
seven" in that supreme line in job: " which starres arise
when the sunne is in Taurus, which is the spring time, and bring flowres." A Latin
poet, indeed, used Pliada as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them as
the Vergiliae, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately connected too with
traditions of the Deluge : and in this association, perhaps also with that of submerged
Atlantis, it is suggestive to note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in
that remote, mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient tradition
of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time of their midnight
culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked the middle of the night by the
setting of those wild-doves of the sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them Aetos,
our "Altair," the nocturnal timekeepers.
But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive the word
"Pleiades " or " Pliades," and in the singular "Plias," from
the Greek word plein, "to sail," because (to quote an eminent living
authority) "the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening of navigation
to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did the close" and though others
consider that the derivation is from pleios, the epic form of the Greek word for
"full," or, in the plural, it many "and so to the equivalent "a
cluster," corresponding to the Biblical Kimah and the Arabic Al Thuruyya, the
Cluster, the Many Little Ones---it is perhaps more likely that a less learned and ordinary
classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering the most probable derivation to be
from Pleione, the nympth of Greek mythology---"Pleione, the mother of the seven
sisters," as she was called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek
poets alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to the infant
Zeus.¹ To this day, indeed, a common English designation for the group is "the Seven
Sisters": and lovers of English poetry will hardly need to be reminded of kindred
allusions, from Chaucer's "Atlantes doughtres seven" to Milton's " the
seven Atlantic sisters" (reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil's "Eoæ
Atlantides") or to Keats' "The Starry Seven, old Atlas' children." The
mediæval Italians had "the seven doves" again (sette palommiele), and
to-day their compatriots speak of the "seven dovelets." It would be tiresome to
go through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races, and a few instances
will equally indicate the prevalence, since the Anglo-Saxon sifunsterri. Miles
Coverdale, in the first complete English Bible, comments on the passage in job, "
these vii. starres, the cloke henne with her chickens"; and to-day in Dorset, Devon,
and other English counties "the Hen and her Chickens" is a popular term, as it
is in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the number seven,
throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of this association with seven may
be traced from the ancient Celtic "The Seven Hounds" to the still more ancient
"seven beneficent sky-spirits of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta" or to the again
more ancient "Seven Sisters of Industry" of remote Chinese folklore. This
feminine allusion in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the
Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred of the Roman writer Manilius---"The
narrow Cloudy Train of female stars " . . . i.e., no doubt, Pleione and her
daughters.
~~~~~~
¹On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology
by Mr. D'Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to a Bunch of
Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) oivá, a dove, so called from
its purple-red breast like wine, oîvos, and naturally referred to a bunch of
grapes; or perhaps because the bird appeared in migration at the time of the vintage. [And
see his further evidence of Cilician coins.]
~~~~~~~
Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely
Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore. What range, indeed,
to cover . . . since we should have to go back to two thousand years B.C. to recover that
fine name, General of the Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the
poets of all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the Mu'allakat, as
translated by Sir William Jones: "It was the hour when the Pleiades appeared in the
firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems": or that line
in Graf's translation of Sadi's Gulistân . . . "as though the tops of the
trees were encircled by the necklace of the Pleiades": or, of our own day, of a verse
such a Roscoe Thayer's:
"slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,"
or lines such as that familiar bat ever beautiful couplet in Locksley Hall:
"Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising tbro' the mellow
shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."
As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they enshrine.
"Seamens starres" our own King James called them, after the popular use. The
Finns call them "the Sieve," and the Provençals the "mosquito net,"
and the Italians "the Battledore." With the nomad Arabs they are 'the Herd of
Camels." Peoples so apart as the ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day,
and the Dyaks of Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely
severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called them "the
Dancers": to the Solomon Islanders they are "a group of girls," and
(strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the Australian aborigines thought of them
as "Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing." There is perhaps no stranger name
than our Gaelic Crannarain (though Grioglachan or Meanmnach is more
common), i.e., the baker's peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker and his
wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth.
But an end to this long excerpting from starry notes! In a later chapter, too, I propose
to write of "Winter Stars," and the Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way and
I must take warning in time to condense better and write "more soothly" as
Chaucer has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation from Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's preface to
his Greek Birds, to which I have alluded in a footnote. "As the White Doves
came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile, so over the sea and the
islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names. And our Aryan studies must not blind us to
the presence in an Aryan tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or
from the nameless and forgotten language that aras spoken by the gods."
Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths
and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month!
What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd
looked up from the illimitable desert and called this dim cluster, this incalculable
congregation of majesty and splendour, Al Najm, "the Constellation ". . .
"the Constellation", since the first wandering Bedouins halted in the
moonlit Sahara to bow before Al Wasat, the Central One: since the poets of the
Zend-Avesta hailed the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set,
changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives . . . for not long
ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven
Friends of Christ, and named them newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, joy,
and Peace.
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