Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment rivers and feed the well-springs, and that Maia’s breath falls in dew. The detail is fanciful; the central thought is in accord with legend and old wisdom. I do not know how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water, particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has been traced. It runs through many ancient records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks of ‘retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades,’ and mention has already been made of the Hindû association of them with ‘Flame.’ But Hesiod’s allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in a warm country where the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with days of sweltering closeness and heat. Moreover, Hesiod himself uses equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him, speaking of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with Pindar, Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest mention of them in ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds; and again as ‘the Seven Virgins’ and ‘the Virgin stars’—thus at one with his contemporary, the Hebrew Herdsman-prophet Amos, who called them by a word rendered in the Authorised Version of the Bible as ‘the seven stars.’ As for the Hindû symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred and primitive element, and that every begetter of life in any form would naturally be thus associate. The Hindûs called the Pleiad-Month (October-November) Kartik, and the reason of the great star-festival Dībalī, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy, after the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of dry warmth and beauty. The ‘sweet influences’ of the Pleiades thus indicated will come more familiarly to many readers in Milton’s

“the grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc’d,
Shedding sweet influence,...”

This ancient custom, the ‘Feast of Lamps,’ of the Western Hindûs survives to-day in the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ in Japan, though few Europeans seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.

In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent, both in ancient and modern tradition, with springs and rains and floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the comment in the old Breeches Bible, opposite the mention of ‘the mystic seven’ in that supreme line in Job: ‘which starres arise when the sunne is in Taurus, which is the spring time, and bring flowres.’ A Latin poet, indeed, used Pliada as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them as the Vergiliae, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately connected too with traditions of the Deluge: and in this association, perhaps also with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive to note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in that remote, mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient tradition of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time of their midnight culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked the middle of the night by the setting of those wild-doves of the sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them Aetos, our ‘Altair,’ the nocturnal timekeepers.

But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive the word ‘Pleiades’ or ‘Pliades,’ and in the singular ‘Plias,’ from the Greek word plein, ‘to sail,’ because (to quote an eminent living authority) ‘the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening of navigation to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did the close’—and though others consider that the derivation is from pleios, the epic form of the Greek word for ‘full,’ or, in the plural, ‘many’—and so to the equivalent ‘a cluster,’ corresponding to the Biblical Kimāh and the Arabic Al Thuruyya, the Cluster, the Many Little Ones—it is perhaps more likely that a less learned and ordinary classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering the most probable derivation to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek mythology—‘Pleione, the mother of the seven sisters,’ as she was called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek poets alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus.[1] To this day, indeed, a common English designation for the group is ‘the Seven Sisters’: and lovers of English poetry will hardly need to be reminded of kindred allusions, from Chaucer’s ‘Atlantes doughtres sevene’ to Milton’s ‘the seven Atlantic sisters’ (reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil’s ‘Eoae Atlantides’) or to Keats’ ‘The Starry Seven, old Atlas’ children.’ The mediæval Italians had ‘the seven doves’ again (sette palommiele), and to-day their compatriots speak of the ‘seven dovelets.’ It would be tiresome to go through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races, and a few instances will equally indicate the prevalence, since the Anglo-Saxon sifunsterri. Miles Coverdale, in the first complete English Bible, comments on the passage in Job, ‘these vii. starres, the clocke henne with her chickens’; and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other English counties ‘the Hen and her Chickens’ is a popular term, as it is, in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the number seven, throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of this association with seven may be traced from the ancient Celtic ‘The Seven Hounds’ to the still more ancient ‘seven beneficent sky-spirits of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta’ or to the again more ancient ‘Seven Sisters of Industry’ of remote Chinese folklore. This feminine allusion in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred thought of the Roman writer Manilius—‘The narrow Cloudy Train of female stars’ ... i.e., no doubt, Pleione and her daughters.

[1] On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by Mr. D’Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) to οἰνάς, a dove, so called from its purple-red breast like wine, οἶνος, and naturally referred to a bunch of grapes; or perhaps because the bird appeared in migration at the time of the Vintage. [And see his further evidence of Cilician coins.]

Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore. What range, indeed, to cover ... since we should have to go back to two thousand years B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the poets of all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the Mu’allakāt, as translated by Sir William Jones: ‘It was the hour when the Pleiades appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems’: or that line in Graf’s translation of Sadi’s Gulistân ... ‘as though the tops of the trees were encircled by the necklace of the Pleiades’: or, or our own day, of a verse such as Roscoe Thayer’s:

“slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,”

or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful couplet in Locksley Hall:

“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”