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Atlas is above all a father of stars. By the Oceanid Pleione (who has no page here) he begot the Pleiades, the seven sisters — Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope — who were pursued across the sky and set among the constellations as the familiar cluster of the Pleiades. Eldest and most honoured of them was Maia, who in a cave on Mount Cyllene bore Hermes to Zeus; she alone of Atlas's many daughters has her own page here.
Atlas is likewise called father of the Hyades, the rain-bringing sisters who form the face of the constellation Taurus; of the Hesperides, the nymphs of the golden apples at the world's western edge; and, in Homer, of Calypso — "daughter of Atlas of baleful mind" (Odyssey 7.245) — the nymph of the island Ogygia who held Odysseus with her for seven years and offered him immortality if he would stay. Through these daughters Atlas, the bearer of the heavens, becomes also the ancestor of half the western sky.
+A different tradition, told fully only in Roman poetry, explains the great Atlas range of northwest Africa as the Titan's own petrified body. This version should be flagged as late: it belongs to Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.627–662), not to the early Greek sources, and it recasts Atlas not as the sky-bearer under sentence but as a giant king who rules the far west and owns a garden of golden-apple trees, guarded because an oracle of Themis had warned him that a son of Zeus would one day come to plunder them. When Perseus, flying home from slaying Medusa, alighted in Atlas's country and asked for a night's rest — naming himself a son of Zeus — Atlas remembered the prophecy and tried to drive him off by force. Overpowered by the giant's bulk, Perseus turned away as if in defeat, then lifted from his wallet the head of the Gorgon and held it up. At its gaze Atlas became what he had been in the older myth in a new and literal way: his beard and hair grew into forests, his shoulders and arms into long ridges, his head into the summit, and his bones stiffened into stone, until he swelled to the size of a mountain — "and the whole sky, with all its stars, came to rest upon him" (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.657–662). It is a neat, late fusion of two ideas the Greeks had kept separate: the Titan who holds up the heavens, and the mountain in the west that carries the name of Atlas. In the authentic Greek tradition Atlas is not turned to stone by any Gorgon; he stands, living and straining, beneath the sky.
Atlas had little in the way of organised worship in the Greek world. Unlike the Olympians, he received no great temples, no Panhellenic festivals, and no established priesthood; he lived in the imagination as a figure of cosmology and story rather than as a god to whom one sacrificed. His importance was explanatory — he accounted for why the sky stays up, where the world ends in the west, and how the Pleiades and Hyades came to shine — and geographical, since the far-western mountains beyond the known world came to bear his name (the Atlas range of northwest Africa), imagined as the petrified or towering giant himself.
Atlas is honoured today less as a god to be petitioned than as an image to live by — the enduring one who carries what must be carried. For a modern devotee or admirer, his meaning is the dignity of bearing a heavy burden without laying it down: responsibility shouldered, strength kept under strain, the quiet holding-up of a family, a duty, or a world. To "bear the weight of the sky" is a fitting emblem for anyone who sustains others.
Those who wish to mark him can do so under the open night sky, for his true burden is the heavens themselves. Find the Pleiades — his daughters, the little misty cluster near the shoulder of Taurus — and the Hyades that form the bull's face, and give a moment's thought or a few words to the Titan who fathered them and holds up their dome. A raised gaze to the stars, a word of respect for endurance freely given, is the most faithful honour to Atlas. And in keeping with the myth, picture him rightly: not stooped beneath a globe of the earth, but braced beneath the whole vault of heaven.
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