The Sisters and the Hunter

Almost everywhere that people have told stories about the Pleiades, the Pleiades are young women — and very often the stars of Orion are a man pursuing them. In Greece the hunter Orion chased seven sisters, the daughters of a Titan, until Zeus made them doves, and then stars. The chase never ends: every night the sisters rise first, and Orion comes up after them.

In the Western Desert of Australia the Pleiades are the Kungkarangkalpa, the Seven Sisters, and the man is Wati Nyiru. His pursuit crosses the continent as a songline — a route of waterholes, rocks and hills that the story made, each place a scene in it, sung in order by Anangu, Martu and Ngaanyatjarra people. It is a constellation that is also a map of three deserts.

A version recorded by Daisy Bates at Ooldea, on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, has something extra. Nyeeruna reaches for the sisters with fire magic in his hand — Betelgeuse — but the eldest sister, Kambugudha, stands in his way, and her foot — Aldebaran — holds fire magic too. His fire flares and dies away; hers answers.

Both of those red stars really do vary. The astronomer Duane Hamacher argues the story is an observation — and in 2019–20 Betelgeuse faded to about a third of its usual brightness, exactly the kind of change the story describes.

In Arnhem Land the Yolŋu see no hunter. Orion is Djulpan, a canoe: Betelgeuse and Rigel at either end, the Belt as three brothers sitting in it, and the Orion Nebula as the fish they caught — a fish their law forbade, so the Sun-woman Walu sent a waterspout to carry them into the sky. From the south Orion hangs upside down, and a canoe is exactly what it looks like.

Most of these stories count seven sisters, and most people can see six. Many then explain the missing one: in Greece Merope hides in shame for marrying a mortal, or Electra in grief for Troy; in the desert a sister is caught, or is too young.

Ray and Barnaby Norris offer a reason. Pleione, at the east end, is so close to Atlas that the eye merges them, and 100,000 years ago the two stood further apart. If the story is that old, they suggest, it may have left Africa with the first modern humans — a bold claim, and a contested one.

Watch the cluster climb: its risings set calendars. Its first dawn rising in midwinter is Matariki, the Māori new year; in Hawaiʻi, Makaliʻi rising at dusk opened the Makahiki. Andean farmers plant late if the Pleiades look dim in June — a real forecast: El Niño's high thin cloud dims them, and El Niño years bring less rain.