The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades Read online

  This is not as contradictory as it first appears, for she is part of the sevenfold deity I have already identified as the Seven Sisters in ancient Egyptian cosmology. The idea that the Godhead can represent more than one personality is common to many religions, hence the popular saying, ‘All the Gods are One God.’114 One of the better known divisions is the Triple Deity of Brahma, Shiva and Krishna of Hindu tradition, or the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Christianity, or the Triple Goddess of Crone, Mother and Maiden in Goddess worship and pagan religions. In The Language of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas says that notions of the sevenfold deity or the multiple deity are ‘aspects of the one great Goddess with her core functions: life-giving, death-wielding, regeneration and renewal.’115 Nature itself is multiple, she stresses, which explains the Goddess’ many manifestations, especially in her aspect as Mother Nature.116

  Water girls, ice maidens, winged bulls and bird goddesses of the Pleiades

  The painting that Krupp refers to comes from Groote Eylandt in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. It portrays an artist’s interpretation of a traditional story of the Wutarinja fisher-women of the Pleiades and their hunter husbands in the Orion constellation. In this part of Australia, Orion is seen as a canoe in which the Burumburumrunja fishermen travel to fish and hunt for food for their families, including their Pleiadian wives.117 In this regard, it is remarkably similar to the Maori star legends of the Tainui waka (canoe) of which the three belt stars of Orion make up its stern and the stars of the Pleiades its bow.118 Although the ‘theme of pursuit’ is not present in this particular story, as Isaacs points out,119 both myths highlight another familiar theme — the association of the Pleiades with water in all its various forms: rain, frost, ice, snow, rivers, creeks, lakes and oceans. In Greek and Aboriginal mythology the Pleiades are often referred to as ocean or sea nymphs or as water girls and ice maidens. Their relationship with water is multi-layered and multi-faceted and we see numerous connections of the Pleiades with the weather, agriculture, navigation and sailing.

  A passage in the Talmud connects the Pleiades with floods and rain: when the Almighty Creator wished to send a flood to Earth he simply removed two stars from the Pleiades to cause the Deluge, only to replace them with two stars from Ursa Major as celestial bath plugs when he wished the waters to abate.120 In a similar vein, an Aboriginal Australian legend from Ooldea on the Nullarbor Plains of South Australia tells how the Minmara (the Bird Women of the Pleiades) stemmed the floodwaters of the Southern Ocean from ‘eroding the mainland.’121 The flood started after a kangaroo skin bag full of fresh water burst during a disagreement between two brothers. The Sisters promptly set about building a barrier made from the roots of the kurrajong tree to stop the ocean waters flooding the plains. ‘This explains why ngalda roots contain fresh water and the kurrajong is the water tree,’ say Ronald and Catherine Berndt in The Speaking Land.122 A vital clue to the Pleiades’ connection with water lies in their representation as birds, particularly aquatic birds.

  In many Aboriginal Australian legends, the Pleiades are often interchangeably described as birds and women, like the seven emu women who are chased by dingo men in the story of the Magara. The application of avian imagery to the Pleiades in many world cultures is a prevalent motif, says Richard Allen, who points out that in many eastern European countries the Pleiades are often depicted as ‘a hen with her chickens.’123 In her account of Polynesian astronomy, Maud Makemson relates that the Pukapukan Islanders in the northern Cook Islands, who see themselves as the descendants of the Pleiades, also refer to their people as Te Manu Mataliki, ‘the Birds of the Pleiades.’124 In the Greek legends the Sisters are turned into doves and one of them, the second eldest, is linked with the European kingfisher that gave rise to the legendary halcyon days in Greek mythology.125

  Very few writers have attempted to provide an adequate explanation for this avian association with the Pleiades. One of the first was the nineteenth-century British ornithologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who speculated on the existence of some kind of astronomical relationship in the Greek legend but does little more with this observation.126 Robert Graves goes one step further in exploring their astronomic and spiritual symbolism, but only in relation to the halcyon legend and not to their wider application.127 Similarly, Marija Gimbutas writes of the significance of bird imagery in the art and spiritual traditions of what she calls ‘Old Europe’ in regard to Goddess worship, but does not relate this discovery to the stars generally or to the Pleiades specifically.128 Nonetheless, her diligent research and probing insight into the underlying symbolism of birds, in particular their aquatic aspects, has enormous implications for understanding their connection to the stars of the Pleiades.

  The ‘Bird Woman’ is another aspect of the Mother Goddess as supreme creator and is one of her most ancient insignia, says Gimbutas, who spent years analysing old European artefacts with these images.129 She believes many of the decorative icons on these relics, which included sculptures and clay pottery, may be read as a kind of ‘language’ of the Goddess and she identifies various types of abstract or hieroglyphic symbols that comprise its iconography. For instance some markings are clearly alphabetic, such as the letters V, X and M. Others are more glyph-like, such as diamonds and triangles. Some images are more representational in that they show the Goddess in zoological form as a bird, snake, pig, frog or bee, having real features such as breasts, eyes, hands or bird’s feet.130 V markings, or the chevron in particular, says Gimbutas, are typical of waterbirds and other aquatic items such as mussels whose significance in Australian Aboriginal culture is part of their sacred laws.131 Over time the chevron has become ‘the designating mark of the bird goddess.’132 Its significance is that it marks the ‘pubic triangle’ and therefore represents the vulva — the ‘life-giving moisture of the Goddess’ body.’133 Other signs besides the chevron that embrace the aquatic sphere include ‘zigzags, wavy or serpentine bands, net and checkerboard’ of streams, rain, creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans.134 All these glyphs are associated with the life waters of the Goddess and ‘with her functions as Life Giver.’135 They embrace the aquatic realm because of the prevailing belief that ‘all life comes from water.’136

  This so-called language of the Bird Goddess not only gives added insight to the aquatic themes of the Pleiades in various world mythologies but it provides an analytical framework for deeper analysis. It is especially relevant to the Dreaming of the Seven Sisters among the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia, whose spiritual beliefs were viciously denigrated, then vindicated, in the highly publicised Hindmarsh Island case, but only after an exhausting and damaging legal battle with Australian courts who failed to recognise and value the richness and wisdom of their Indigenous cultural heritage.137 Perhaps some day the legal fraternity and the wider Australian society will understand and appreciate the significance of these Dreamings and what they mean to our world heritage.

  The idea that all life comes from water is central to Ngarrindjeri beliefs relating to the creation of their world of all living beings, human and otherwise. Although the publicised legend (as opposed to that which remains secret) does not specifically refer to the Seven Sisters as birds, nonetheless flight of some sort is implicated. Flight enables the Sisters to come down from the heavens to visit their mother who lives in the waters surrounding Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island).138 Having stayed behind to invest the waters with life, the mother’s presence is central to the spiritual wellbeing of the people and the environment, without which there can be no existence, no connections and no communications between people and their ngatji — totemic animals, fish and plants.139

  The confluence of the River Murray and its tributaries, Lake Alexandrina and the Southern Ocean, where saltwater mixes with freshwater, is the centre of Ngarrindjeri creation.140 Because this area is connected with conception, reproduction and fertility it involves women’s business generally, and also specifically, with the Dreaming of the Seven Sisters. For it is the Mantjingga who issue divine orders to Ngarrindjeri women by giving them ‘directives about life, about preparing for womanhood, marriage and childbearing.’141 Every winter when the stars of the Pleiades are no longer visible in the evening skies, the Ngarrindjeri believe the Sisters are visiting their mother in the sacred waters. But, says Ngarrindjeri elder Veronica Brodie, ‘there has to be a clearway, so they can return.’142 The necessity to ensure this clearway resulted in the legal battle at Hindmarsh Island, but to no avail and the bridge was built against the wishes of the Ngarrindjeri women. To what extent it has obstructed the flow of celestial energies from the Pleiades or their impact on the Dreaming of the Seven Sisters in this area is not known, but it remains an important Dreaming place for those who choose to believe.

  Besides their immediate association with the Pleiades, aquatic symbolism is used to represent women or femaleness in Aboriginal Australia. Among the threefold Aboriginal nation of the Ngarinyin, Worora and Wunambal in the Kimberley, the sign for a woman is the water mussel or darrul darrul.143 In this region of Bandaiyan, Aboriginal Law forbids young boys to eat the water mussel because ‘it symbolises a woman’s body’ and is therefore sacred or mahmah.144 In Yorro Yorro, one of my Aboriginal elders and teacher, the late David Mowaljarlai, explains why this is so: when the Wandjina creator ‘made the little girl, he put a water mussel between her legs so that man would find it when she grew up, to revere and look after his companion.’145 The splay of two fingers to form a V sign is used to indicate how ‘Wandjina drew that on earth’ as part of his plan to create women.146 It had never occurred to me until I read Gimbutas’ work, why so many ancient cultures placed the Mother Goddess in Taurus. The answer is now obvious, for Taurus is the only constellation in the night skies that is marked by a distinctive V-shaped asterism or star pattern. As Gimbutas states, this V pattern is the very mark of the Goddess in her bird and bovine aspects that represents her horns and feet. The pattern is also played out in the skies above us in the flight path formation of birds.

  The connection of the V with Taurus, in particular the shape of its horns, ‘provides the key to understanding why the bull is linked with regeneration,’ says Gimbutas.147 Drawing on the earlier work of Dorothy Cameron in Symbols of Birth and Death in the Neolithic Era, she says the head and horns of the bull bear an ‘extraordinary likeness’ to ‘the female uterus and fallopian tubes’; the perfect symbol of the female reproductive organs.148 This interplay between birds and bulls as interchangeable signs for Taurus and the Pleiades comes from direct observations of the symbiotic relationship between both animals, which is a direct result of this regeneration process. Cows and bulls, like birds, eat grass seeds, which in turn are further dispersed and pollinated through the flight of birds. Their relationship is further strengthened by the mutual benefits they bring to one another; the bull offers protection from predators while birds remove ticks and other parasites, which threaten it with infestation and the possibility of disease.

  Some writers suggest that the universal terrestrial image of birds sitting on the backs of bulls may have served as an astronomical symbol for the stars of Taurus and the Pleiades in several ancient civilisations, including Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. These images adorned the walls and ceilings of palaces and pyramids and in some instances were imprinted on coins. Richard Allen suggests that an ancient coin from the Greek Isle of Samos showing a single dove on a bull’s back, estimated to be about 2,600 years old, might represent the Pleiadian doves.149 Today in Egypt the same image can be seen on the ceiling of the tomb of Set I in the Valley of the Kings.150 Although some would argue this bird represents the falcon-god Horus, it is worth remembering that his mother was Hathor the Cow Goddess and Pleiadian Queen in ancient Egyptian mythology.151 The winged bull was a popular icon in ancient Mesopotamia where it represented Taurus or the ‘Bull of Heaven’ as it is referred to in the classic Gilgamesh epic. In some ‘rare illustrations’, say the Jobes, it was depicted with a lone bird on its back, which may have indicated the Pleiades.152 On the other hand, the composite image of bird and bull may have emphasised the joint relationship between Taurus and the Pleiades.

  Apart from the life-giving functions of the Bird Goddess, another aspect to the spiritual dimension of birds relating to their shamanistic nature is particularly revealing of their connection with the stars of the Pleiades. In many cultures birds are seen as sacred messengers because of their ability to fly into the heavens where they communicate with gods and spirits. As a consequence the flight of birds takes on a deeper meaning, which represents spiritual transcendence and release from earthly bondage. ‘Magical flights’ and other kinds of ‘ascent into the sky’ are the special trademarks of shamanism, says world-renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade, especially when they are tied to dreams and ecstatic ritual practices.153 The use of feathers in ceremonial rituals is therefore designed to emulate the perceived qualities and talents of birds and to call on their totemic powers to assist shamans and other ritual participants. Besides the use of hallucinogenic substances, music — particularly drumming — is an integral component of inducing altered states of consciousness that enhance the shamanic experience. The authors of Hamlet’s Mill take the analysis to another level. They argue that quite apart from sky travels and heavenly ladders, a closer inspection of shamanic practices reveals ‘very ancient patterns’ that are associated with universal rhythm and the maintenance of time through sound and vibration.154

  The idea that sound is fundamental to the process of creation is familiar to modern science, as it was to the Ancients and expressed in Plato’s ‘Harmony of the Spheres’. Several writers, including Madame Blavatsky and Barbara Hand Clow, have linked the stars of the Pleiades to the Harmony of the Spheres and the creation of our universe through the manipulation of sound and vibration. Hand Clow’s reference to the birdsong of the Pleiades is alluring in this regard. In The Pleiadian Agenda she claims that birdsong is a seven-dimensional sound that ‘causes human language to be so sound coded.’155 It is intriguing that some Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime legends tell of a time in the distant past when birds once taught human beings how to speak! Although Blavatsky’s theories and Hand Clow’s writings are largely ignored by mainstream academia because they are perceived as being too obscure or New Age, on the other hand the more erudite and scholarly (and perhaps more academically acceptable) Hamlet’s Mill is effectively saying the same thing. In examining the motifs and designs of drums in ancient Mesopotamia, Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend identify the region surrounding Taurus and the Pleiades as the central celestial location governing time and creation. They note in particular that the ‘tuning’ and ‘untuning’ of the skies is specifically connected to the changing of the World Ages.156

  On a grander cosmic scale, Barbara Hand Clow offers an alternative explanation for the special relationship that exists between birds, humans and the Pleiades. As in Hindu beliefs and other older spiritual traditions like the Aboriginal Dreamtime, which teaches that everything is consciousness, including stars, Hand Clow maintains that animals are the primary source of ‘star consciousness’ or ‘star wisdom’ for human beings.157 Specifically this translates to cats living ‘the star consciousness of Sirius, the birds of the Pleiades, and the bears of the Andromeda Galaxy.’158 So in The Pleiadian Agenda she refers to the Seven Sisters as our ‘Pleiadian bird teachers’, whom she claims taught us many things during human evolution.159 Many Indigenous peoples, including Aboriginal Australians, share the idea that animals and stars are our greatest teachers. Of these, the birds of the Pleiades play a leading role in the initiation of young women. These shamanic practices lie at the heart of all Aboriginal women’s rituals and ceremonies, especially those relating to the Dreaming of the Seven Sisters. Who could forget the Seven Sisters corroboree performed at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in September 2000, when Australia’s Indigenous women spectacularly broadcast the Dance of the Pleiades to the rest of the world?

  Birds of flight, divination and navigation

  Beyond these spiritual aspects, the flight of birds, their individual traits and biological characteristics have contributed enormously to our understanding of navigation, which led to world exploration and colonisation of lands that enabled the survival of our species. The inbuilt navigation systems of birds, in particular, made them reliable companions to ancient mariners where certain species indicated the presence of landfall.160 The recognition of the avian navigator and their role in piloting sailors to safety led to the ancient Greek custom of releasing pigeons at the commencement of the sailing season.161 Given that the stars of the Pleiades heralded this auspicious event, and the fact that Zeus turned them into doves (a species of pigeon), then it is likely these birds symbolised the Sisters in zoological form. Here we can make all sorts of connections between the Sisters with the celestial, atmospheric and nautical realms. We can trace these associations in sailing, the flight of birds, and the fullness of seasonal cycles, numerical systems and even sexual relations.