The Seven Sisters

As Pleione walked the Boeotian countryside with her seven daughters — Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope and Merope — the giant hunter Orion, son of Poseidon, saw them and burned with desire. He pursued them for seven years, for their father Atlas could not defend them: he stood at the world's western rim holding up the sky, his hands quite literally full. In their desperation the sisters called on Zeus, who transformed them first into doves, and then, to make their safety eternal, into stars set in the shoulder of the Bull. But the rescue was double-edged: when Orion died, he too was raised into the sky — placed just behind them, so that the hunt continues every night, the Hunter rising forever in pursuit of the Sisters as they flee below the western horizon. Only six of the sisters shine plainly. The Greeks said the seventh, Merope, alone of the sisters married a mortal man — Sisyphus of Corinth — and faded from the sky out of shame.

In the Dreaming, the seven sisters — called Makara by the Adnyamathanha, Mayi-mayi by peoples of the Darling, Kungkarangkalpa in the Western Desert songline — travelled the land, radiant, with long hair and bodies of glittering ice. They were followed everywhere: in the southeast by the Berai-berai, young men who left gifts of honey; in the Western Desert by Wati Nyiru, a persistent and unwelcome pursuer whose desire drove the sisters from waterhole to waterhole across the country, their flight literally mapped onto the landscape as a songline crossing thousands of kilometres. To escape at last, the sisters rose into the sky and became the cluster of cold bright stars we see today; their pursuer rose after them and follows still — the stars of Orion, forever behind, never catching. One sister was taken — in the Darling River telling, the fire-ancestor Wurrunnah seized two, whose ice melted and quenched his fire — and this is why fewer sisters shine brightly now. When the sisters rise in the winter dawn they shake ice from their bodies, and frost covers the ground: the sign that initiation ceremonies may begin. Children scrape the frost and rub it on their bodies so the boys become strong hunters and the girls grow beautiful; but a child touched by sunlight while frosted will be weak forever.

A band settled by a lake for the autumn, and while the elders worked, seven children met each day in a quiet clearing to dance. An old man in shining white appeared among them and warned them to stop, but the dancing had grown sweet to them and they would not. One day, dancing hungry — their parents had refused them food to bring them home — the children began to rise slowly into the air, growing lighter with every turn of the dance. Their parents ran with food and called after them, but only one child looked down; he fell, streaking to earth as a falling star. The others rose on, and rose still, and became Oot-kwa-tah, the cluster of dancing stars that returns each autumn — six bright, and the seventh dim or fallen, singing as they went until they sang themselves out of hearing.

The Seven Sages of the northern sky — the stars of the Big Dipper — had seven wives. Agni, god of fire, emerged from the sacrificial flame and desired them; in the oldest tellings the goddess Svaha took the form of six of the wives one by one to lie with him, but she could not counterfeit Arundhati, whose devotion to her husband was perfect. When the deception was discovered, the six wives were nonetheless suspected and put aside by the sages. They departed the northern sky and became the Krittikas, the sharp-bladed stars of the Pleiades; only Arundhati remained with the Sages, and she is the small star Alcor, beside Mizar, shown to brides on their wedding night as the emblem of fidelity. The seed of fire that Svaha had gathered became the six-faced war god Skanda (Karttikeya), whom the six Krittikas suckled — one mouth for each mother — so that the cluster is forever both the accused wives and the nursing mothers of war.

Seven sisters were playing away from camp when their brother was transformed into a bear, and the bear turned on them. The girls fled to the stump of a great tree, which spoke to them: 'Climb upon me.' As they climbed, the stump began to rise into the air, and the bear came leaping against it, scoring the bark on every side with claws as long as knives — the furrows that ring Devils Tower to this day. The rock bore the seven girls up beyond the bear's reach, and up still, until they were pushed into the sky, where they remain: the seven stars of the cluster that rises over the tower in winter. The bear circles the base of the tower still, in the shape of the scarred stone.

Seven boys spent their days rolling the gatayusti wheel and dancing instead of tending the corn. Their mothers, exasperated, boiled the boys' game-stones in the pot instead of dinner. The boys danced their anger in a circle, praying the spirits to take them where they would not trouble their mothers again — and as they danced their feet left the ground. The mothers ran; one seized her son by the heel and dragged him down, but he struck the earth so hard the ground swallowed him. The other six rose until they reached the sky, where they dance still: Ani'tsutsa, the Six-who-were-Seven. The mother of the buried boy wept over the spot each morning until a green shoot rose from her tears and grew into the pine — the seventh brother, still reaching for the sky, evergreen because he is still trying to follow.

The Japanese name for the Pleiades, Subaru, means 'gathered into one' — a knot of stars strung like beads, admired for a thousand years in poetry as a jewelled cluster of the winter sky. Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book (c. 1000 CE) lists Subaru first among the stars worth seeing. But there is no canonical chase, no hunter, no lost sister: the classical Japanese material treats the cluster as an image of unity and elegance rather than the frozen scene of a pursuit. Later folk tradition in some regions counts the stars as six or seven sibling stars, and scattered local tales attach various children or jewels to them, but nothing resembling the pursued-women narrative is native to the tradition. This variant matters to the tracker precisely because it is a near-null result: a literate star-loving culture, perfectly aware of the same six-or-seven star knot, that never generated the sisters-fleeing-a-hunter story. Salient stars do not automatically produce the myth — which sharpens the question wherever the full story does appear.