Sister of the Sun We pulled the stars from the skies and brought them down to Earth. But at what cost? When we turned on all these lights we lost something precious. The stars. A long time ago, in a world lit only by fire, our relationship with the stars was far more personal. For thousands of generations, we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it. Because they did. We humans were not the biggest, the strongest, nor the fastest of all the animals we competed against. But we did have one thing going for us our intelligence. One aspect of that was a genius for pattern recognition. Night after night, we watched the stars. And over time, our ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival. In a time when our imaginations were the only stage where stories came to life, before there were movies or TVs or electronic devices of any kind, every human culture connected the dots to form their own pictures. These images became the illustrations of a storybook that, on a deeper level, was also a survival manual. The names and personalities of the gods, heroes, farm animals or familiar objects varied from culture to culture. But there was one particularly gorgeous group of stars known to the Ancient Greeks and to us today as the Pleiades, a star cluster formed about 100 million years ago. Each of them is some 40 times brighter than our Sun. And Alcyone, the most luminous, outshines our Sun 1,000 times. For ages, the Pleiades have been used as an eye test for people all over the world. If you could see at least six of them, you were considered normal. If you saw more than seven, you were an ideal candidate for a warrior or scout. Among the Ancient Celts and Druids of the British Isles, the Pleiades were believed to have a haunting significance. On the night of the year that they reach the highest point in the sky at midnight, the spirits of the dead were thought to wander the Earth. This is believed to be the origin of the holiday once known as Samhain, now called Halloween. All over the Earth, our ancestors told wonderful stories to explain how the Pleiades came to be in the sky. For the Kiowa people of North America, it happened something like this. Long, long ago, some young women snuck away from their campsite to dance freely beneath the stars.
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.