Transcription
The story of the Seven Sisters, which is sometimes known as Dreamtime, is said by some to be one of the oldest stories in existence. It is a story that is told around the world, where a man, often a hunter, chases a group of young women, often sisters, and to be protected, these women are turned into stars. The version of this story from Greek mythology is the most well-known; this has Orion chasing Atlas's daughters. This story is connected to a group of stars known as the Pleiades, which are also known as the Seven Sisters.
But there are two main mysteries in what I have just told you. First off, why are the Pleiades called the Seven Sisters, where most people can only see six stars? And secondly, how did the myth associated with them—the one with the Hunter and the young women—manage to be told on opposite sides of the world, with similar stories told in Greece and Australia? Can we show whether this myth spread in recent times? Because if not, the alternative means that it could be almost a hundred thousand years old.
And so, if you want to know why these six stars are called the Seven Sisters and why the same myth is told on opposite sides of the world, then I would recommend getting comfy, because I want to tell you a story—a very old story. So grab yourself a cup of tea and welcome to Kraken Photo. Thank you.
The Pleiades, in the grand scheme of the universe, are a very young group of stars, certainly no more than a hundred and twenty-five million years old, meaning they appeared whilst dinosaurs were still wandering the Earth. But whilst this is interesting, it isn't as useful as knowing when humans came along to start recording them in our history. Now, the first written evidence we have of humans being aware of the Pleiades comes from Chinese astronomical literature dated to 2357 BCE. They have been discussed a lot since then, and I will link to a number of published papers about them in this video's description. However, the oldest visual representation of them is thought to be on the Nebra Disk, and this is dated to around 3600 years old and was found in Germany. I'll circle the Pleiades on them to make it easier to see. The representation is very much symbolic and is not an accurate astronomical map or guide, but there are no other obvious candidates to what it could be representing, given the context of the disk, which is what we feel this is representing—the Pleiades.
The actual stars themselves look like this: the blue nebula surrounding them is due to their young age, as it is leftover space dust that was not used as part of those stars' creation but is still within these stars' vicinity. These stars have been given names from the characters of the Greek mythology about them. So the stars represent the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione and are named Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope. There are also two stars named after their parents, Atlas and Pleione.
So now we have the basics out of the way, let me tell you the Greek version of the myth of the Seven Sisters. Pleione was walking through the Boeotian countryside with her daughters when she was seen by Orion, a giant of a hunter. In fact, he was so giant he could walk on the sea floor and his head would still be above the sea. On seeing these beautiful women, the son of Poseidon, often considered the most handsome of men, he desired them, and so he chased after them. He felt especially drawn towards Pleione's daughter, Merope, although some accounts of the myth suggest that he was actually after Pleione. Either way, he pursued these women for seven years, by which time there was such desperate need of help they turned to Zeus for protection. Zeus agreed to help them as he knew their father, the Titan Atlas, was busy holding up the sky in the heavens and so could not help, as his hands were literally full. And so Zeus turned the young women into doves, but realizing they still weren't completely safe, he then immortalized them by turning them into stars and placed them in the heavens in the constellation of Taurus the Bull.
But Orion was a bit of a rascal, and his less than honorable endeavors did not end there, for he also wooed the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. This relationship was very much frowned upon by her younger brother, Apollo, and his deception of Artemis would lead to Orion's final demise. Upon Orion's death, Zeus immortalized him by placing him in the sky, although some stories say it was Artemis who placed him in his heavenly abode. But this placement was unfortunate for the Seven Sisters, who were continually the objects of affection from some of the Olympian gods, and now Orion was placed so very close to them, continuing the chase through mythology. The help from Zeus was also not without consequence, as he went on to seduce four of the sisters, because, for anyone who follows Greek mythology knows, Zeus liked to get around a bit. It is this lustful connection which can be linked to the central star of Taurus, Aldebaran, which is known as the Eye of the Bull. The Arabic translation means "the follower," for this star follows the Pleiades across the night sky. There are also some who think that this may have led to the colloquial term "old school" to refer to a male philanderer.
Now, whilst this is a well-known Greek myth, there are over ninety other motifs that incorporate the Seven Sisters within known mythology around the world. We know this as information on these myths has been collected by a Russian academic called Yuri Berezkin. Through the help and support of my patrons, I've translated this information into English and merged it with other data of folklore and stories and created a new mythology database, which is available to my patrons and other academics. I would like to say thank you to them all now for their support, their questions, and ideas, as they really have made so many things possible and are making a real difference in the information available to researchers in mythology.
Now, one piece of information we can see from this resource's data is that these types of stories are told in Australia and are often seen as part of some First Nation Australian tribes' culture and ritual. They refer to this as the Seven Sisters of Dreamtime, the Mulga, or what we call the Pleiades. These are seven beautiful sisters with long hair and radiant bodies made of ice that's shown in the night sky. These sisters were followed everywhere by a group of young men known as the Bilibili. These men would leave special gifts for the sisters, and most often honey, as they were good at finding hives and taking honey. The Mulga appreciated the gifts but always resisted the approaches of men.
Now, one day, an old ancestor of fire named Warrana kidnapped two of the beautiful girls. In doing this, his fire started to melt the girls' bodies, and this melting of the girls' bodies then led to putting out Warrana's fire. He then decided to keep these girls far away and place them in the sky, but after putting out Warrana's fire, they did not shine anywhere as bright as they used to. And so, over time, their other sisters joined them in the sky, and there some of them continued to shine very bright indeed. The Bilibili saw this, and so they let themselves die for love so that they too would turn into stars, and they would form what we would now know as Orion's Belt. It is said that even in the sky today that the Bilibili continued to give honey to the Mulga, and in return they sing for them. But in order to ensure that the Mulga are not forgotten about, they occasionally take ice off their bodies and let it fall to Earth, and it is this that starts a ritual for the coming of age, which happens during late winter when the Pleiades first appears in the Eastern Australian sky. When this happens, frost is often seen covering the Earth, and older children of the tribes then go to the nearest spring and scrape frost from the ground and rub it over their bodies. This ritual allows boys to go into strong hunters, and the girls will go into beautiful, buxom women. This, in turn, allows their noses to be pierced with a bone, and so finishes the ritual of coming of age. There's a word of caution here: for should a beam of sunlight to touch their bodies whilst covered with frost, the child will forever be weak.
This Australian myth of Dreamtime has a number of forms and are said to relate to the time when the first humans came to Australia, naming the lands as they dispersed around the continent. This process and time was captured in stories, in songs, in rituals, and as the cultures of these first people were already based, these stories were committed to memory and passed down through generations. And so within these stories we hear of floods and fiery mountains, of strange lights and strange beasts, of lost landscapes. With regards to the Seven Sisters stories of people from long ago, these stories in Australia do vary, as do the name of the Pleiades within them. For example, the Adnyamathanha people of South Australia, their sisters are known as the Magala, whereas the Bundjalung people of Northern New South Wales refer to them as the Merime or the Mayi Mayi, as in the story I've just told, whereas the Walamagarri of Western Australia call the sisters the Wirla, while the Kulin of Victoria tell the story of the Kellakulk. Whilst these names vary, the stories are still similar in so much as they normally involve water in some way, such as in the form of frost or ice or even rain. These tales have these women associated with this form of water and often chased by hunters, and these are often represented by the stars in Orion's belt.
So between Greece and Australia we have two myths that are very similar, told in locations on opposite sides of the world. And so the question has to be: are they from the same source? Now, there will be some of you say this is just a coincidence, and so let's try and understand what these coincidences could be by looking at the two versions of the story. In doing this we will see that there are three specific elements of the myth that are or could be considered similar—yeah, that's overlap and so therefore could be a coincidence—and they are that both myths associate the Pleiades with a number of young girls, often sisters; both identify Orion as a male and normally a hunter; and both have a line where he himself acted in an unbecoming manner onto those girls. If you don't believe that this is just a coincidence, then this suggests a common origin, and one that must predate European contact with Australia. The first time we know this happened was in 1788. If this is the case, the last time these two peoples had a common ancestor would have been at least seventy thousand years ago. In 2009, some work was published by Nice and Nice providing an explanation for this, and it is their work that the majority of the evidence for understanding this similarity is leveraged from in this video.
But pause here for a moment and talk about the other mystery. Boy, you haven't pressed the like button. It's an important part of the initiation ceremony for watching Kraken Photo videos and makes a big difference to this video's success. And so now, hopefully you've pressed the button and passed the initiation to stay with me, I can continue.
So the other mystery we have here is about why the myths are referred to as the Seven Sisters when most people can only see six stars. And in fact, from an astronomical perspective, there are ten bright stars in the cluster of Pleiades. So have we lost a star? So why is it we can only see six stars with a good human eye? Well, this isn't a modern puzzle. We have writings from a third-century BC Greek poet named Aratus of Soli who names the Seven Sisters but then reports only six are visible to the eyes. This isn't just within Greek and Australian mythology; many cultures around the world regard the cluster as having seven stars, but they acknowledge that only six are normally visible and then create stories to explain why the seventh is invisible. These "lost Pleiades" stories are found in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America. In the Greek versions of the myth, the most common motif of why the star is lost is due to Merope falling in love with a mortal man, and she was so ashamed of herself that she faded from sight. In First Nation Australian mythology, one, although sometimes two, of the sisters die or are in hiding or have been abducted, leaving only six or five visible stars. In North America, we have a story from the Wendat Iroquois, and here one star sang as they rose into the sky and so forgot to stop and lost their energy and so faded out of sight. In Islam, it is said that the seventh star fell to Earth and became the great mosque.
Now, if you look at all these stories, then you would have to come to the almost inescapable conclusion that once upon a time there were seven visible stars in the Pleiades, and one disappeared. This is something that many cultures were aware of. For this to be a story, the seven stars must have been noticeable at some point in human history, and so part of the myth which would lead on to the development of these "lost Pleiades" myths. This has been described by Herzog as the combined testimony of numerous societies spanning continents and millennia for a seventh easily visible Pleiad which subsequently dimmed, which all in all feels like good evidence in its own right, but it isn't really tangible evidence. And so our question should be: do we have any evidence of a star dimming in this constellation outside of the myth?
The Pleiades' brightest stars are what astronomers call B stars, and these are stars that are known for having variable brightness, changing over hundreds of thousands of years. We also noted that there was some surrounding nebula dust around these stars, which could again exaggerate any fading or indeed allow the stars to shine brighter, depending on whether the nebula was in front of the stars. Whether these changes on their own are really noticeable to a human eye, even over the course of a hundred thousand years, is unlikely. The stars do have motion, and motion we can accurately map using astronomical technology. Using such techniques, we can map where these stars were a hundred thousand years ago and compare them to where they are today. Now, looking at this, your initial perception and the result could be that this doesn't necessarily help us, but if we look closely at a star called Pleione—Atlas's wife—we can see, when compared to Atlas's position, it has moved in the last hundred thousand years, and this would have looked more like this to the human eye if we simulate the visual appearance of this. This assumes the stars were viewed from the same location and the same point in the sky, and we will see then that Pleione, a hundred thousand years ago, was visible as a separate star. This is an image from a Nice and Nice paper.
So our question is: could the Pleiades have been seen as seven super-stars at any time in the past where humans could see them? And the answer is that there was enough evidence here to suggest that this was probably the case, the most significant of which is that the fact of the star called Pleione was further away from Atlas in the past. And even if we ignore the potential variability of brightness, it would still have been seen as this, especially with those with good eyesight. This is something we've seen in the myth of the Cosmic Hunt, where the use of Alcor as a separate attribute in the myth helps us evidence the fact that the story was about the same set of stars. So here in the Seven Sisters, we see that Pleione is the evidence we need to say that these stories were talking about the same set of stars. However, these stars only stopped being seven and became six stars between a hundred thousand and seventy thousand years ago.
The ancestors of the First Nation Australians left Africa between a hundred thousand and seventy thousand years ago, and these were closely related in terms of DNA to those humans who then went on to populate Eurasia. These humans, who would become the First Nation Australians, arrived in Australia around fifty thousand years ago, and by thirty thousand years ago they had dispersed around the whole of the Australian continent, or the outside at least. But at fifty thousand years onwards, these First Nation Australians became a continuous and unbroken cultural line with little in the way of other cultures interacting with the majority of people until 1788 with the arrival of the Europeans. Now I would also say that there was some interaction between North Australia and Indonesia slightly earlier in this due to the harvesting of sea cucumbers by the Makassar people from Indonesia, but for all intensive purposes, the population of Australia as a whole remained isolated from the rest of the world for at least fifty thousand years. And so the humans who were the people that would eventually split into those dispersing to Australia by Southeast Asia and those that would eventually go into Europe were last together at least seventy thousand years ago and probably a little longer than that. At this point in time, we believe the Pleiades would probably still have been seen as seven visible stars.
So what does this mean? Does it mean the story of the Hunter and the girls are from the same route, the same source? After all, there is similarity between the First Nation Australian and Greek stories of the Pleiades and Orion, which is that they identify the Pleiades as a group of young girls; that they identify Orion as a hunter, or young man, or group of men; and they both have stories in which the group represented by Orion is attempting to catch the group represented by the Pleiades. Then we have the fact that cultures in both places have called the cluster Pleiades the Seven Sisters, although most humans can only see six stars, and then they have stories to explain why the seventh star is now invisible. I have no doubt that the story of Orion and the Pleiades told today from Greek mythology is thousands of years in the making, as are the Dreamtime stories of the Mulga in Australia. But we are looking at this as academics and not as hopeless romantics, despite how much many of us would want the evidence to be solid and so to point to an early single source of this myth being a hundred thousand years old. The fact is the evidence I've spoken about today has a couple of issues, and so let's talk about them for a minute.
The Pleiades and Orion are some of the most easily distinguishable objects in the sky at night, and so many cultures will have stories about them. Actually, we see this: the Pleiades having over 340 mentions in motifs in Berezkin's database, spread across pretty much every region in the world, and Orion has over 220 motifs in slightly fewer areas. This means that when compared to the less than 100 motifs about the Seven Sisters, it would be sensible to suggest that the cultures told stories about these stars because they were easily identifiable in the night sky, and changes to these objects would have been noted by any cultures that looked at the sky—which is all of them. And so we need to ask ourselves: what are the chances that two separate cultures on opposite sides of the world called the set of stars in Orion a group of men and the Pleiades a set of women? Now also consider that the Earth's rotation gives the impression that Orion is chasing the Pleiades across the night sky. So with that, then I think labeling the stars as males chasing females has a high probability of coincidence, especially with hunters chasing pretty women being a common Upper Paleolithic motif, because cultures were predominantly hunters.
But there's also academic pushback on the data used to under-position the stars, as in the paper by Nice and Nice. The data used was based on old information and what are now considered to be out-of-date measurements, which have an error rate of around 50%, meaning that the position of Atlas and Pleione would have been 50% closer than this simulated photo from 100,000 years ago shows. Now this doesn't mean someone with good eyesight probably couldn't have distinguished between the two stars seventy thousand years ago, especially if the brightness and nebula were in our favor, but it does throw doubt on the lost star hypothesis, or it could suggest that the lost star motif is even older than we think. For it to be noticed as being lost, there are universal motifs that have survived since the African dispersal events 70,000 years ago, but myths—and by that I mean a whole story combining motifs—are less resilient to time and dispersal. We do have old stories in humanity's culture that have survived; the Cosmic Hunt is one where the evidence is much stronger than we have here, and we can piece together a motif's evolution to recreate older stories, such as the earliest Croatian myths, the flood myths, and dragon myths.
And so, considering all the evidence, my view would be that statistics favor coincidence in the Greek and Australian stories being similar, partly due to the significance of the stars involved, but also because there are aspects to the Australian story, especially around ritual and water, which seem to be completely lost in the Greek version of the myth, which I wouldn't expect to happen. This leaves us with just a hunter chasing a woman motif, and this is not a rare motif nor exclusively associated with the Pleiades and Orion. Then the astronomical evidence about there being two stars into one is weaker than suggested in the Nice and Nice paper. But we must also ask ourselves: why are there so many stories insisting that there were seven stars, even though only six are visible to most people? Together with the story explaining the lost Pleiad, the evidence I've spoken about does suggest that possibly seven stars were visible 100,000 years ago, and evidence suggests this motif has traveled around the world. It was a very recognizable object in the night sky; its change would be reflected in stories, and these changes would have only happened because the change was noticed. And this could have only happened probably no later than the time of the African dispersal of humans. But to say the story of hunters chasing women traveled with it, that I'm not completely convinced by; any evidence doesn't really support it, not in a significant manner. This motif is not dispersed in a way that one would expect.
You know, I have no doubt that Dreamtime stories are very old, but it is very difficult to date them using solid evidence, and the ones I can date I've covered in a previous video and can relate to tangible evidence. We can, with a very non-academic gut feel, say that these Dreamtime stories, including the Seven Sisters, may well be as old as the First Nation Australian culture. And so yes, there is a chance this story of hunters chasing women predates a significant dispersive event from Africa 70,000 years ago, but we must acknowledge that, due to the huge number of other stories about Orion and the Pleiades and a lack of hunting mythologies in them, whilst it is something I want to believe is true, my academic head desires better evidence to conclude this as being the oldest story in the world, or indeed for it being over 50,000 years old. But from the evidence, what I will say is that the motif of seven stars turning into six within the Pleiades star cluster is probably seventy to one hundred thousand years old, and that makes it one of the oldest motifs we know.
Now I'm sure there will be many comments about this, and so please them below, and I will do my best to respond to as many as I can, even if it means making another video to respond to these, as there were many other myths about the Pleiades as well I wish to tell you. But for those who want to look at other evidence to show how we can reconstruct these old stories, then I have a video on the Cosmic Hunt and the dragon myths. But perhaps a good parallel to this video is this one about the earliest questions we know. And if you haven't seen it, I'd recommend this. So until then, please stay safe and well. This was Crichin Fold.