STARS

STARS . In all times and places, the starry night sky has both challenged and satisfied the human need to order, categorize, and standardize the unknown. In their efforts to make the night sky a familiar place, ancient civilizations imposed on groups of stars the outlines of mythical and historical figures, thus linking the celestial and terrestrial realms. The two terms used for these star groups are constellation and zodiac. Constellations are groups of stars held together by the human mind and eye. While certain of them may be related mythologically, such as the Pleiades and Orion, they are essentially autonomous and not limited in number. The zodiac is an integrated system of twelve constellations, referred to by astrological signs, that forms a backdrop to the movements of the sun, moon, and planets. Each zodiacal sign is also associated with a part of the human body and thereby serves to link the celestial and terrestrial planes. Aries, the first sign, represents the head; Pisces, the feet; the ten remaining signs between them represent other parts of the body in descending order. While scholars credit Babylonia with devising the zodiac (c. 700–420 bce), the Babylonians themselves in their creation epic, the Enuma elish, credit the god Marduk with that invention.

The ancient Egyptians also developed an integrated system of star organization. Here, the thirty-six decans, or star groups, each ten degrees in width and each named for a deity, served two purposes. The heliacal rising (first appearance in the dawn sky) of the leading star of each decan was noted, then used to mark out the twelve-month Egyptian calendar. At night, the decans functioned as a star clock, enabling priests to know the correct time for the performance of religious observances. In this way the temporal rhythms of the earth were linked to those of the sky.

In Indian tradition the Nakṣatras, or lunar mansions, comprise another integrated system of stars. The passage of the moon through the sky was charted as the journey of the god Soma through his "resting places." Each star is thought to be inhabited by one of the twenty-eight wives with whom Soma spends one night each month.

The Sky in Myth

In religions around the world, the sky symbolizes transcendence and sacrality, stretching and satisfying the human imagination. Whether it is understood as the home of the gods, the resting place of heroes, or the land of the dead, the sky is often envisioned as the transcendental model for human existence. The powers of the stars watch and guide people in life and welcome them in death. As the land of the ancestral dead, the stars represent the place of future human existence and reward. In them humans will endure forever, see and know all, thus also becoming godlike.

On the terrestrial plane, everything exists in a state of constant change. Nature is unpredictable—sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent. The sky alone remains constant, predictable, beyond change. Since the distant sky gods are usually the lawgivers of a culture, establishing order in human society, the celestial-terrestrial relationship is a reciprocal one: Humans order the uncharted night sky by imposing images on it, while the heavens, in return, impose lawful order on human society.

Catasterisms, tales in which either humans or animals achieve immortality by becoming stars, express the notion of the stars as the home of heroes. Catasterisms present a permanent image of the reward for heroic feats while providing an etiological explanation for the existence of individual stars and constellations. These tales exists in such diverse cultures as Australia, where a man becomes a star to avoid the wrath of the irate husband chasing him, and Greenland, where a group of lost seal hunters become stars. The Greeks and the Romans were the most prolific creators of catasterisms.

These stories relate that after death the soul becomes a star, a notion that originated with the Pythagoreans. The belief that only heroes become stars leads to the use of star groups such as Herakles and the Pleiades as models for heroic effort and reward. Star groups such as Andromeda and Orion, by contrast, serve as demonstrations of the lasting punishment given for the sin of hubris. The star Antinoüs was named in 132 ce in honor of Hadrian's young lover who drowned himself in the belief that he could thereby add the years allotted to him to Hadrian's life.

The Milky Way, which is frequently called the River of Heaven or the Celestial Road, is connected with the notion of the stars as the land of the dead. In Norse mythology it is the road of the ghosts going to Valho̜ll; in Celtic lore it is created by Gwydion so that he can use it to seek his son's soul in the heavens; in Islam it is said that Muḥammad walked on it to reach God; in Akkad it was called the River of the Divine Lady and was traveled by ghosts; in eastern Washington state the Sanpoil Indians place the land of the dead at the end of it; the Pawnee say it is the path followed by the spirits of the dead, and the Lakota add that travel to the Spirit Land is interrupted just before arrival by an old woman who checks for wrist tattoos; those without tattoos are sent back to earth as ghosts.

Temples and the Stars

The most concrete way to establish the importance of the stars in the ancient world is to study the alignment of temples with particular stars. As sacred structures, temples—especially those dedicated to sky gods—are designed according to a celestial pattern. In 1894 J. Norman Lockyer published his research on Egyptian temples, under the title The Dawn of Astronomy. With the advent of modern technology, much of Lockyer's dating has been called into question, but his general theory of celestial alignment is still operative. In England, the Americas, and the ancient Near East there is evidence of such alignment. Ancient temples were most commonly constructed in relation to the sun's position at the solstice or equinox, but there are significant instances of design with relation to individual stars.

Astral alignments are established by astroarchaeologists, who calculate the age of a site from its remains and then use computers to recreate the star patterns visible at the time the site was built. England's Stonehenge (construction started c. 2800 bce) is a good model. There, the large standing stones were arranged against the horizon to function as foresights; smaller stones served as backsights. In order to mark the passage of the sun, the astronomer-priest would fix a spot on which to stand to observe the sunset against the foresight stones. As the sun changed its course during the year, it would set to the right or left of these stones, its extremes marking the solstice and equinox points. Stonehenge was used as an elaborate observatory for marking the important celestial events of the year. The movements of the sun, moon, planets, and important star systems such as the Pleiades and especially the heliacal risings of the stars and planets were all noted there.

The same principle was employed in Mesoamerica, most dramatically at Tenochtitlán, the political and religious capital of the Aztec, where the course of a river was altered in order to create the desired alignments for observing the rising sun at the equinox and solstice and the heliacal rising of the Pleiades. Other Mesoamerican sites were also constructed with relation to the Pleiades, as well as to the stars Capella and Sirius and the planet Venus.

Gerald Hawkins (in Stonehenge Decoded, Garden City, N.Y., 1965), using modern techniques, has checked Lockyer's thesis at several sites in Egypt. While disagreeing with some of Lockyer's findings, he does establish that Egyptian temples are aligned with certain stars. Edwin C. Krupp (1978) has made a connection between the alignments of the pyramids and the cult of Isis and Osiris, represented respectively by the stars Sirius and Orion. First, he notes that all stars are invisible for approximately seventy days when their light is lost in the brighter light of the sun; he finds it significant that the ancient Egyptians called this time "being in Duat" (i.e., the underworld). Krupp sees a relation between this time span and the period allotted for embalming: Seventy days were required to prepare a body for burial. Because the stars are often thought of as the land of the dead, Krupp suggests further that the shafts in the pyramids aligning with Sirius and Orion were constructed so as to allow the souls of the pharaohs to rise up to these stars, the souls' final resting place.

In North America there are few sites of astronomical interest, but where they exist the myths and legends of the people also show astronomical characteristics. The kivas of the Anasazi, ancestors of the modern Pueblo, show some evidence of astral alignment, and modern Pueblo rituals preserve astral timings. Among the Plains Indians, medicine wheels constructed of large and small stones arranged in the shape of a wheel with spokes establishing alignments, mark the solstices. In Saskatchewan, Canada, the Moose Mountain Medicine Wheel is also aligned to the heliacal rising of the bright summer stars Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius.

The Polestar

Sometimes diverse cultures use similar images to describe the same star. The polestar, or North Star (the position held today by the star Polaris in Ursa Minor), because of its relative lack of motion as compared to other stars, is important for both land and sea navigation. In many cultures it is seen as the center of the universe.

Norse people believed that the gods ordered the universe by driving a spike through the earth and causing the heavens to revolve around this axis. The end of this spike was fastened to the polestar. For the Mongols, the polestar was the golden peg or nail that holds the turning heavens together. In India it is called the "pivot of the planets" and is represented by the god Dhruva, who was so immovable in his meditation that he became the polestar shining about Mount Meru, the center of the world. Because Dhruva began his meditation in a search for constancy after having been disappointed by the unsteadiness of his father's love, the star is worshiped in India as a source of constancy both in meditation and in marriage. The Mandaeans, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, worshiped the polestar as the central star around which all other heavenly bodies move; their sanctuaries were built so that persons entering them faced the polestar. Worshipers prayed facing it, and the dying were positioned so their feet and eyes were aligned with it.

The constancy of the polestar also led to its popularity among sailors, as the epithets Steering Star, Lodestar, and Ship Star show. (Strabo, the Greek historian and geographer of the first century bce, attributed its use among Greek sailors to Thales, the astronomer and philosopher of the sixth century bce.) The constant position of the polestar made it useful to land travelers as well. In Mesoamerica it was thought both to protect and to guide traveling merchants, who burned copal incense in its honor. The Arabs used the polestar to navigate across the desert and believed further that fixed contemplation of it would cure itching of the eyelids. For the Chinese, the polestar was secretary to the Emperor of Heaven and as lord of the dead punished the dead according to their deeds.

The Pleiades

Even in societies where little attention was paid to the stars, the movements of the Pleiades were noted. For instance, the Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa regulated their agricultural calendar by them, and in Bali the Pleiades and Orion were used to keep the lunar calendar. In Australia, where the first annual appearance of the Pleiades coincides with the beginning of the rainy season, the Aborigines consider these stars the source of rain and curse them if rain does not follow their appearance. In general, the last visible rising of the Pleiades after sunset is celebrated all over the southern hemisphere as beginning the season of agricultural activity.

Where myths have developed about the Pleiades, these stars are generally associated with women. In the Greco-Roman world, these stars were called the "seven daughters of Atlas," and in China they were worshiped by women and girls as the Seven Sisters of Industry. In Australia, they are seen as young girls playing instruments for a group of dancing 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 Arundhati is considered the ideal Indian wife because her virtue was great enough to resist the god Śiva'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 moment. 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 season 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 connection to the agricultural season in part explains the emphasis placed on the Pleiades. In Greece the Pleiades presage temperate 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 rising of the Pleiades and closed with their setting in late autumn. 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 regulate 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 ancient Egypt, Sirius played a role there similar to that of the Pleiades among the Aztec. Sirius's heliacal rising at the summer 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 considered 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 smaller, 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 centuries, 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 predicted his death upon its return. A comet recorded in 431 bce gave support to the notion that Julius Caesar had become a comet upon his death a year earlier. Shakespeare made dramatic use of this idea when he wrote "When beggars 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 revealed 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 century ce, also believed that comets signaled disaster and specified, 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 Albertus 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 the comet appeared and had died three months later, on the very day it disappeared. Elizabeth I of England gained great prestige by manifesting her indifference to the comet of 1557. When her courtiers tried to deter her from looking at the dreaded object she advanced boldly to the window, declaring, "the die is thrown." Seventeenth-century Christian preachers declared that comets were sent by God to draw human beings to repentance, and as late as 1843 the Millerites thought a comet confirmed their belief in the immediate destruction of the world.

Among the Aztec similar notions prevailed. They called comets "stars that smoke" and thought they usually signified the impending death of members of nobility; the death of the ruler of Tenochtitlán followed the appearance of a comet, and another was said to have predicted the fall of Moctezuma II. The Plains Indians also connected appearances of comets with disaster and misfortune.

In the Society Islands, comets (along with meteors) were believed to be the tails of gods, and when they were seen, the people threw off their upper garments (the mark of respect shown to gods and sacred head chiefs) and exclaimed, "A god! A god!" But in Samoa comets were believed to predict the death of a chief, or some other calamity such as war or bloodshed. The Indian astronomer and astrologer Varahamihira (sixth century ce), while generally concurring with such theories, developed an elaborate system of analysis to predict the three types of events comets can bring: auspicious, inauspicious, and having mixed effects.

Shooting and falling stars, meteors, and meteorites have in common the sacred quality of having come from the heavens, whether for good or ill. Like comets they are preeminently seen as signs and portents. Ptolemy says they indicate the coming of winds and storms, while Seneca links them to violent political events. By contrast, some believed them to be connected with healing. Pliny preserved the notion that a corn may be successfully extracted at the time of a shooting star; the physician Marcellus (fourth century ce) says the same of warts, adding that if you start counting while a star is falling, the number will equal the number of years you will be free of sore eyes. In India falling stars are thought of not only as reincarnating souls traveling back to earth, but also as demons who love the night and who are connected in a negative way with the souls of the dead. Such beings are especially dangerous to pregnant women.

Among the most famous meteorites in religious history is the Kaʿbah of Mecca, which tradition says was brought to earth by the archangel Gabriel. Also important is the meteorite of the goddess Cybele of the Phrygians. It arrived in Rome in 204 bce, when Rome was being threatened by Hannibal. The Sibylline Books, which had been consulted after a meteorite shower, foretold that a foreign army could be driven from Italy if Cybele's symbol, a meteorite, was brought to Rome. It was, and Hannibal was defeated. The Romans expressed their gratitude to the goddess by erecting a temple to her on the summit of the Palatine and held an annual celebration to commemorate her arrival.

The alignments of temples, the long history of astrological beliefs, and the abundance of myths and folktales about the stars provide ample evidence for the existence in many cultures of the notion "as above, so below." This view of the universe, in which the terrestrial and celestial realms are recognized as interrelated, has been a source of great richness to the cultural and religious experience of the human race.

See Also

Astrology; Ethnoastronomy; Sky.

Bibliography

The best collection of myths surrounding the stars, constellations, and zodiac is Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (1899; reprint, New York, 1963). Allen makes no attempt to synthesize his material, which is arranged in alphabetical order. For the various astral systems of the ancient world, see Robert Brown's Researches into the Origin of the Primitive Constellations of the Greeks, Phoenicians and Babylonians, 2 vols. (London, 1899–1900); for their scientific background, see Otto Neugebauer's The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (1951; New York, 1969); while Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, translated by F. E. Robbins (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), remains the starting place for Western views. For the Nakṣatras and general Indian views, see The Brihajjātakam of Varāha Mihira, 2d ed., translated by Swami Vijnanananda (New Delhi, 1979), and Robert De Luce's Constellational Astrology according to the Hindu System (Los Angeles, 1963). The decans are covered by Wilhelm Gundel in Dekane und Dekansternbilder (Hamburg, 1936). Lynn Thorndike's A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–1958), remains a valuable resource on the West up to the medieval period.

On the issue of alignments, Joseph Norman Lockyer's The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians (1894; Cambridge, Mass., 1964), while challenged today, helped to create the field of astroarchaeology. This work is continued in In Search of Ancient Astronomies, edited by Edwin C. Krupp (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), which also contains excellent essays on ancient astronomy, and in Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony F. Aveni (Austin, 1977), which treats archaeological sites in North and South America.

Finally, in part 4 of The Raw and the Cooked (1969; Chicago, 1983), Claude Lévi-Strauss provides an interesting comparison of similar myths of particular constellations, such as the Pleiades, in South America and ancient Greece.

New Sources

Aveni, Anthony F. Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures. New York, 1997.

Condos, Theony. Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans: A Sourcebook Containing the Constellations of Pseudo-Eratosthenes and the Poetic Astronomy of Hyginus. Grand Rapids, Mich, 1997.

Evans, James. The History & Practice of Ancient Astronomy. New York, 1998.

Krupp, Edwin C. Skywatchers, Shamans, & Kings: Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power. New York, 1997.

North, John David. Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos. New York, 1996.

Serinity Young (1987)

Revised Bibliography