The Pleiades Across Cultures: One Asterism, Many Skies

The Pleiades Across Cultures: One Asterism, Many Skies

One of the nearest star clusters to Earth is the Pleiades. In Western astronomy, it is located in the constellation of Taurus. It looks like a little smudge of light, though the smudge really is a cluster of 1000 stars with about six or sevenbeing visible from Earth. 

Almost every culture has noticed this cluster and created stories about it. The Greeks saw six sisters fleeing a hunter, with the seventh being lost. The Japanese saw a gathering, a coming-together. The Maori saw the eyes of a god and the turning of the year. Following the Pleiades around the world turns out to be a tour of how people looking at the same patch of sky arrive at meanings that are sometimes wildly different and sometimes uncannily alike. In modern times, they are the Subaru logo. 

What the Pleiades actually are

Before the stories, the beautiful stars themselves.

The Pleiades, cataloged as M45, are an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, sitting roughly 444 light-years away. (The distance has been argued over for decades; this is the figure most measurements now agree on.) The cluster holds around a thousand stars, of which six to nine are visible to the naked eye, depending on your eyesight and how dark your sky is.

By star standards, the cluster is young, about 100 million years old. The brightest members burn blue-white and hot, the signature of stars early in their lives. In long-exposure photographs, a soft haze surrounds the brightest stars. For a long time, people assumed this was leftover gas from the cluster’s birth, but it is actually a separate cloud of dust that the cluster happens to be drifting through right now.

The named members in modern catalogs are Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, Pleione, Celaeno, and Sterope (sometimes split off as Asterope in a variant listing). 

Greek and Mediterranean

In Greek myth, the Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione: Alcyone, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Sterope, Celaeno, and Merope. The giant hunter Orion pursued them through the woods until Zeus, taking pity, lifted them into the sky as stars. Orion was set among the stars, too, and so the chase continues overhead, the hunter forever following the sisters across the night and never closing the gap. The constellation of Orion does, in fact, appear to trail the Pleiades as the sky wheels from east to west, so the story plays out nightly.

The Greeks also noticed that only six stars are easy to see, and they had explanations ready. One says Merope hides her face out of shame for marrying a mortal, Sisyphus. Another says Electra turns away in grief over the fall of Troy. 

The cluster was practical in use as well as poetic. Around 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod used the rising and setting of the Pleiades to time plowing and harvest. This is one of the earliest written records of the cluster serving as an agricultural calendar. Greek sailors used it as daily clock: the dawn rising of the Pleiades marked the opening of safe sailing season, and their evening setting marked its close.

Vedic: Krittika

In Vedic astronomy, the Pleiades are Krittika, the third of the lunar mansions called nakshatras. The name carries the sense of “the cutters” or “the razors,” and the cluster is tied to Agni, the god of fire, which gives the stars the nickname of the fire stars.

The mythology gives the Krittikas a maternal role. They are six women (sometimes seven) who became foster mothers to the war god Kartikeya, also known as Skanda or Murugan. In the story, Kartikeya is born with six heads so that he can nurse from all six Krittikas at once. There is also a pairing across the sky: in some traditions, the Krittikas are the wives of the seven sages, the Saptarshi, whom we see in the stars of Ursa Major. The two asterisms face each other, and the rising of Krittika marked an important point in the Vedic ritual calendar.

Chinese: Mao

In the Chinese system of 28 lunar mansions, the Pleiades are Mao, written 昴 and often translated as “Hairy Head.” Mao belongs to the western quarter of the sky governed by the White Tiger, and the cluster represents the bristling fur of the tiger’s mane.

Mao is one of the reference stars named in the Yao Dian, an ancient text describing the stars that mark the seasons, which suggests the cluster has held its place in Chinese astronomy for a very long time. Its bright, compact shape made it an easy landmark and an anchor for tracking positions across the sky.

Japanese: Subaru

The Japanese name Subaru, also written 昴, comes from a verb meaning to gather or to be united. What the name points to is not the individual stars but the fact of their togetherness, the cluster as a single bound thing.

That meaning carried into the modern world. The Subaru car company takes its name and its six-star logo from the cluster; the firm was formed by the merger of six companies, and the asterism’s sense of separate parts brought into one was exactly the point. The cluster also has a long literary life in Japan. In the early eleventh century, Sei Shonagon listed Subaru among the beautiful things in her Pillow Book.

Maori and Polynesian: Matariki

In Maori tradition, the Pleiades are Matariki, the “eyes of the god” or “small eyes.” When Matariki rises at dawn in the depths of the southern winter, around June and July, it marks the Māori New Year. In 2022, New Zealand made Matariki an official public holiday.

The cluster runs through the wider Polynesian world under many names, Makali’i in Hawaiian among them. Polynesian wayfinders, navigating thousands of miles of open Pacific, used the cluster’s position as one of the markers that kept their canoes on course.

Australian Aboriginal traditions

Across the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, there are many distinct traditions about the Pleiades, and a recurring shaperuns through them: seven sisters pursued by a man, who is often identified with stars in Orion. The resemblance to the Greek story is striking. 

The astronomer Ray Norris has argued that it might point to a shared origin reaching back tens of thousands of years, possibly before humans left Africa. That argument is speculative, and other researchers are unconvinced, so it is best held as an intriguing possibility rather than a settled fact.

The Seven Sisters Songline is one of the great narrative traditions of Aboriginal Australia, tracing the sisters’ journey across the continent in a way that links features of the land to features of the sky. 

North and South American traditions

The cluster anchored calendars and ceremonies across the Americas as well.

The Hopi of the American Southwest call the Pleiades Chuhukon, “those who cling together,” and the cluster’s rising and setting help time ceremonies including Wuwuchim and Soyal. The Lakota know them as Wicincala Sakowin, the Seven Little Girls, and the Cherokee tell of seven boys who danced themselves up into the sky.

Farther south, the cluster was important in agriculture. The Inca treated the Pleiades as the mother of the harvest, and their appearances structured the planting calendar of the Andes. The Maya built observations around the cluster’s passage overhead and its dawn rising, and the Pleiades figure in the workings of the Maya sacred calendar.

The lost Pleiad

One detail keeps surfacing across all these separate traditions: the sense that there should be seven stars, but only six are easy to see. Greek, Aboriginal Australian, Cherokee, and many other traditions carry some version of a lost sister or a missing star.

Why is there a story of a lost star? Astrophysicists Ray Norris and Barnaby Norris offer a striking explanation: that in the distant past, the cluster may have shown seven separate stars more clearly, and that the slow drift of Pleione toward neighboring Atlas has gradually blurred the two into one as the naked eye sees them. If that is right, the “lost” sister was once visible, and the stories preserve a memory of a sky that has since changed. The idea is debated, but the theory is interesting. 

Why the Pleiades

So why this cluster, out of everything in the sky?

A few things line up. 

The Pleiades sit near the ecliptic, the path the Sun travels, which makes them visible from nearly all of the inhabited Earth.

Because the Sun passes near them in May and June, their dawn and dusk appearances fall at predictable points in the year, exactly the kind of regularity a calendar needs. 

The cluster is small enough to read as a single unit rather than a scatter of stars, yet it sits right at the edge of what the naked eye can resolve, so it lends itself to closer scrutiny. 

Visually, the blue-white of its brightest members stands out against the warmer white of most bright stars.