seen as young girls playing instruments for a group of danc-
ing young men, the stars of the Orion group. In the Solomon
Islands they are called a “company of maidens,” and among
the Yurok of North America they are thought of as six
women. In India they had a rich and varied identity as the
nurses of Skanda, the infant god of war, and as the seven
wives of the seven sages of Ursa Major. Myths in which they
are depicted as wives describe the reasons for their being
changed into stars as either punishment for infidelity or as
a reward for fidelity. In one positive reading, the star Arund-
hati is considered the ideal Indian wife because her virtue was
great enough to resist the god S ́iva’s attempt at seduction.
Like the polestar, she is worshiped by married couples as a
symbol of constancy.
The Pleiades also played a central role in the religious
life of the Aztec. The fifty-two year cycle of their calendar
was measured by the Pleiades. Indeed, legend recalls that the
destruction of the world in a past age occurred at such a mo-
ment. The ceremony at the end of the cycle, the “Binding
of the Years,” established that the movements of the heavens
had not ceased and that the world would not end but was
guaranteed to last for another fifty-two years. Not only was
one of the alignments of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán to
the Pleiades, but a further clue to the importance of these
stars is the fact that at the time of the city’s erection (c. 150
CE), the heliacal rising of the Pleiades occurred on the same
day as the first of the sun’s annual passages across the zenith,
a day of great importance in demarcating the seasons, and
the day when the sun in Mexico casts no shadow at high
noon. Additionally, this was the beginning of the rainy sea-
son so important to agriculture.
The Inca called the Pleiades the “stars of summer” and
believed that their appearance on the first sighting predicted
the success of the crops. If the stars were large and bright
when they first appeared, the crops would be successful; if
they were small and dim, the crops would fail. This connec-
tion to the agricultural season in part explains the emphasis
placed on the Pleiades. In Greece the Pleiades presage tem-
perate weather: The name of one of the stars of this group,
Alcyone, is connected, by derivation, with the term “halcyon
days,” a clement and temperate time. In ancient Greece the
season safe for navigation began in May with the heliacal ris-
ing of the Pleiades and closed with their setting in late au-
tumn. In the Hervey Islands of the South Pacific they are the
favorite guides for night sailing and are worshiped by sailors.
In North America the Blackfeet use the Pleiades to regu-
late their most important feast, which includes the blessing
and planting of the seed. The Navaho believe the Pleiades
appear on the forehead of their principal deity, Black God.
SIRIUS. Regarded as one of the most important stars in an-
cient Egypt, Sirius played a role there similar to that of the
Pleiades among the Aztec. Sirius’s heliacal rising at the sum-
mer solstice coincided with the annual inundation of the
Nile, thus beginning the Egyptian year. Seen as the goddess
Sothis by the Egyptians, Sirius was also connected with the
goddesses Hathor, Sekhet, and Isis and was generally consid-
ered to be the resting place of Isis’s soul. Also called the “Nile
star,” Sirius had a dog for its hieroglyph and to this day is
widely known as the “dog star.” In ancient Rome, when the
sun approached conjunction with Sirius at a festival for the
protection of grain, farmers sacrificed a fawn-colored dog to
the god Robigus. The Dogon of Africa also connect Sirius
with a grain called po, and Po is their name for Sirius’s smal-
ler, darker companion star. That companion was first seen
by Western astronomers in 1962, yet the Dogon discussed
the star with Western anthropologists as early as 1940.
Claiming to have known of the companion star for eight cen-
turies, the Dogon correctly estimated that its orbit around
Sirius took fifty years.
A Finnish tale explains the brightness of Sirius by the
story of the lovers Zulamith the Bold and Salami the Fair:
When they finally completed a bridge to each other (the
Milky Way) after a thousand years of separation, they rushed
into each other’s arms and melted into one.
COMETS, METEORS, AND SHOOTING AND FALLING STARS.
Noticeably short-lived celestial phenomena such as comets
and meteors (shooting and falling stars) share in the sacred
nature of the sky and add to the meaning of the “permanent”
stars. The abruptness of their passage often made them seem
to be omens full of meaning for good or ill. The American
writer Mark Twain said of himself that he was born when
Halley’s comet approached the earth, and he correctly pre-
dicted his death upon its return. A comet recorded in 431
BCE gave support to the notion that Julius Caesar had be-
come a comet upon his death a year earlier. Shakespeare
made dramatic use of this idea when he wrote “When beg-
gars die, then are no comets seen; / the heavens themselves
blaze for the death of princes” (Julius Caesar 2.2).
In ancient Greece and Rome, comets were generally
thought to portend unfortunate events. The astronomer
Ptolemy (second century) said that the meanings of comets
could be discerned by their individual shapes; their color re-
vealed what they would bring (generally wind and drought),
and their position in the zodiac indicated the country that
would be affected. Pliny, the Roman writer of the first centu-
ry CE, also believed that comets signaled disaster and speci-
fied, for example, that a comet in Scorpio portended a plague
of reptiles and insects, especially locusts. Seneca the Younger,
writing in the first century CE, following Aristotle, said that
comets were portents of bad weather during the ensuing year.
Such ideas persisted after the rise of Christianity. In the
third century CE, the church father Origen held that comets
appear on the eve of dynastic changes, great wars, and other
catastrophes but also may be signs of future good: He seems
to have taken the star of Bethlehem, which announced
Christ’s birth, to be a comet. The German philosopher Al-
bertus Magnus (d. 1280) wrote that comets signified wars
and the death of kings and potentates. According to Ptolemy
of Lucca (d. 1377), a comet portended the death of Pope
Urban IV in 1264. The pope had sickened as soon as theSTARS 8735