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<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"><link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg"><link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico"><meta name="generator" content="Astro v7.1.3"><title>Pleiades · The Golden Thread</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="/_astro/Base.BcHSDnYl.css"><link rel="stylesheet" href="/_astro/_id_.Ck6zwwtF.css"></head><body><header class="site-header"><a class="brand" href="/">The Golden Thread</a><nav><a href="/tree">The Tree</a><a href="/explore">Explore</a><a href="/festivals">Festivals</a><a href="/glossary">Glossary</a></nav></header><main class="container"><h1 data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Pleiades</h1><aside class="at-a-glance" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><span class="tier" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Nymph</span><p class="greek" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Πλειάδες</p><p class="pronunciation" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><span class="respelling" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>PLY-uh-deez</span><span class="sep" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>·</span><span class="ipa" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>/ˈplaɪədiːz/</span></p><p class="meaning" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>"The Pleiades" — the ancients derived the name variously: from plein (πλεῖν), "to sail," because their rising and setting marked the sailing season; from peleiades (πελειάδες), "doves," the flock of doves pursued by Orion and set among the stars; or from their mother Pleione, so that Pleiades simply means "the daughters of Pleione." A related old name is the Atlantides, "the daughters of Atlas"</p><dl data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><div class="row" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><dt data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Domains</dt><dd data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>the star-cluster of the Pleiades, the turning of the seasons, the sailing year, the harvest and the sowing, mountain and spring nymphs, the ancestry of gods and heroes</dd></div><div class="row" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><dt data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Symbols</dt><dd data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster, the dove, the rising and setting of the constellation over the horizon, the vine and the grain whose seasons they announce</dd></div><div class="row" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><dt data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Sacred animals</dt><dd data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>doves</dd></div><div class="row" data-astro-cid-q44da3n6><dt data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>Sacred plants</dt><dd data-astro-cid-q44da3n6>the vine, wheat and barley (whose harvest their rising and setting timed)</dd></div></dl></aside><section class="first-appearance" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>First Appearance</h2><p class="quote" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>The Pleiades appear at the very beginning of Greek didactic and epic poetry. Hesiod's Works and Days (383–384, 619–620) uses them as the farmer's and sailor's calendar — "when the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they set" — and the lost Hesiodic Astronomia named the seven sisters and told how they became stars. Homer sets them in the sky on the great shield Hephaestus forges for Achilles (Iliad 18.485–486), where the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion's might are worked into the bronze among the constellations. From the first, then, the seven are two things at once: nymph-daughters of the Titan Atlas, and the star-cluster by which the ancient world told the turning of its year.</p><p class="src" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>— Hesiod, Works and Days 383–384, 619–620; the Astronomia (fr.); Homer, Iliad 18.485–486 (on the shield of Achilles)</p></section><section class="prose-section" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Who They Are</h2><div class="prose-body" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><p>The Pleiades (PLY-uh-deez), in Greek the Πλειάδες, are the seven sister-nymphs who became the small, close-clustered group of stars that still bears their name — the "Seven Sisters" of the night sky. They are the daughters of the Titan <strong>Atlas</strong>, who bears the heavens on his shoulders, and of the Oceanid <strong>Pleione</strong>, and from their parents they take their two great names: the <strong>Atlantides</strong>, "daughters of Atlas," and the Pleiades, "daughters of Pleione." Their half-sisters, born of the same father by the same mother, are the <strong>Hyades</strong>, another star-cluster close by; and the two groups of star-sisters are often named in the same breath.</p>
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<p>The seven are <strong>Maia</strong> the eldest, <strong>Electra</strong>, <strong>Taygete</strong>, <strong>Alcyone</strong>, <strong>Celaeno</strong>, <strong>Sterope</strong> (also called Asterope), and <strong>Merope</strong> the youngest. Several of them became the mothers of gods and heroes, for the great Olympians sought them out: Maia bore <strong>Hermes</strong> to Zeus (her story is told on her own page), Electra bore <strong>Dardanus</strong>, the founder of the royal line of Troy, and Taygete gave her name to a Spartan mountain and her son Lacedaemon to the city of Sparta. As mothers of founders and kings they stand near the root of many of the oldest Greek and Trojan genealogies — nymphs of mountain and spring who married gods and mortals and seeded the map of the heroic world.</p>
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<p>But it is as <strong>stars</strong> that everyone remembers them. The myth tells that the giant hunter <strong>Orion</strong> pursued the seven sisters across the earth for seven long years, until in pity the gods snatched them up into the sky and set them among the constellations — where Orion still follows them across the heavens, the hunter forever a little behind his quarry. There the Greeks read them as a calendar: the dawn rising of the Pleiades in May opened the season of sailing and of harvest, and their setting in autumn closed it and called the farmer to plough. And there hangs the sky's oldest riddle — that seven sisters were set among the stars, but only six shine plainly to the eye. This page tells the seven together, as the ancients did, and follows the "Lost Pleiad" into the dark.</p>
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</div></section><section class="prose-section" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Mythology</h2><div class="prose-body" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2>Daughters of Atlas and Pleione</h2>
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<p>The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan <strong>Atlas</strong> — the sky-bearer, son of Iapetus, condemned after the Titans' defeat to hold the heavens forever on his shoulders — and of the <strong>Oceanid Pleione</strong>, a daughter of Ocean and Tethys who was reckoned a protectress of sailors. From their father they are the <strong>Atlantides</strong>, and by the same father and mother they are full sisters to the <strong>Hyades</strong>, the rainy star-cluster, and (in many accounts) to the solitary nymph <strong>Calypso</strong> and to the ill-fated <strong>Hyas</strong> whose death gave the Hyades their name. Their mother's name gives them their own: <strong>Pleiades</strong>, "the daughters of Pleione." Born on the slopes of a mountain — Cyllene in Arcadia in the oldest telling, where their eldest, Maia, would bear Hermes — they are nymphs of the wild high country before they are stars, and it is as nymphs pursued through that country that their great myth begins.</p>
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<h2>The seven sisters, each by name</h2>
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<p>The canonical list of the seven, given by Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.10.1) and by the astronomical handbooks, runs: <strong>Maia</strong>, <strong>Electra</strong>, <strong>Taygete</strong>, <strong>Alcyone</strong>, <strong>Celaeno</strong>, <strong>Sterope</strong>, and <strong>Merope</strong> — and to each the genealogists attached a line of descent, so that the seven stars are also seven founding-mothers. <strong>Maia</strong>, the eldest and most beautiful, lay with <strong>Zeus</strong> in the cave of Cyllene and bore <strong>Hermes</strong>, the messenger-god (her story is told on her own page). <strong>Electra</strong> ("the amber one," "the bright") lay with Zeus and bore <strong>Dardanus</strong>, who crossed the sea to the Troad and founded the royal house of <strong>Troy</strong> — so that the Trojan kings, down to Priam, traced their blood to a Pleiad — and also Iasion, beloved of Demeter. <strong>Taygete</strong> lay with Zeus and bore <strong>Lacedaemon</strong>, the eponymous founder of <strong>Sparta</strong>; the great mountain that walls Sparta to the west, <strong>Mount Taygetus</strong>, carries her name. <strong>Alcyone</strong> lay with <strong>Poseidon</strong> and bore Hyrieus (father of Orion, in one tangled strand) and other sons who founded cities in Boeotia. <strong>Celaeno</strong> ("the dark one") also lay with Poseidon and bore Lycus and Nycteus. <strong>Sterope</strong> (or <strong>Asterope</strong>, "star-face") was said by some to have borne Oenomaus, the cruel king of Pisa, to <strong>Ares</strong>. And <strong>Merope</strong>, the youngest, alone married a <strong>mortal man</strong> — <strong>Sisyphus</strong>, king of Corinth, the great trickster — and for that lesser marriage, the poets said, her star shines dimmest of the seven, or hides altogether. Between them the seven sisters gave children to Zeus, Poseidon, and Ares, and mortal husbands besides: a spread of divine and royal parentage that made the Pleiades the ancestresses of half the heroic world.</p>
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<h2>Orion's pursuit and the flight into the stars</h2>
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<p>Their defining story is the <strong>catasterism</strong> — the passage from earth into the sky. The giant huntsman <strong>Orion</strong>, most beautiful and most violent of men, saw the seven sisters (in some tellings with their mother Pleione, journeying through Boeotia) and was seized with desire for them; and he pursued them, relentlessly, across the length of the earth. For <strong>seven years</strong> the sisters fled and Orion followed, never catching them and never giving up the chase, until at last the sisters — or their mother for them — cried out to <strong>Zeus</strong> for release. In pity the god snatched all seven up from the earth and set them among the stars as the cluster we call the Pleiades, and Orion too was set in the sky as the great constellation that bears his name. But the placing keeps the chase alive: <strong>Orion still follows the Pleiades across the heavens</strong>, rising behind them and setting behind them, the hunter forever a stride behind the doves he can never reach. The poets even called the seven sisters <em>peleiades</em>, "doves," and so the whole picture resolves into a flock of wild doves fleeing forever before the hunter, all of them fixed now in the turning sky. Nearby in the heavens their father <strong>Atlas</strong> stands (some saw the neighbouring stars as the sky-bearer), and close beside them glitter the <strong>Hyades</strong>, their half-sisters, so that the family that was scattered on earth is gathered together at last among the constellations.</p>
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<h2>The Lost Pleiad — why the eye sees only six</h2>
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<p>Here lies the sky's oldest puzzle, and the Greeks explained it with one of their most poignant myths. The unaided eye, on a clear night, makes out only <strong>six</strong> stars in the cluster, though the tradition insisted there were <strong>seven</strong> sisters — and so the Greeks spoke of the <strong>"Lost Pleiad,"</strong> the seventh who fled from sight. Two sisters are named as the vanished one. Most often it is <strong>Merope</strong>, the youngest, who dimmed her star and hid her face for <strong>shame</strong> — because she alone had stooped to marry a mortal, Sisyphus, while her sisters lay with gods; ashamed among her shining sisters, she veils herself and will not fully show. In the other telling it is <strong>Electra</strong> who is lost, and hers is a grief and not a shame: she was the mother of Dardanus, ancestor of Troy, and when <strong>Troy fell</strong> and the city of her blood was destroyed, Electra could not bear to watch, and drew her light away, covering her face in mourning — some said she left the cluster altogether to wander the sky as a comet, "the star with unbound hair." Either way, the myth turns an astronomical fact — that the seventh star is faint and hard to see — into a story of a sister who hides: for shame of a mortal marriage, or for grief at the burning of Troy. The <strong>Lost Pleiad</strong> is one of the loveliest examples of the Greek habit of reading the sky as a book of feeling.</p>
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<h2>The star-clock of farmer and sailor</h2>
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<p>Long before they were a story, the Pleiades were a <strong>calendar</strong> — perhaps the single most important star-marker of the ancient agricultural and seafaring year, because the small bright cluster is easy to find and its risings and settings fall at just the turns of the season that matter most. <strong>Hesiod</strong> builds the working year of the <em>Works and Days</em> around them: "When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are <strong>rising</strong>, begin your <strong>harvest</strong>, and your <strong>ploughing</strong> when they are <strong>setting</strong>" (383–384) — that is, their first dawn rising in mid-May told the farmer to reap the ripe grain, and their dawn setting in early November told him to plough and sow for the next year. For the <strong>sailor</strong> they were the same clock: Hesiod warns (619–620) that when the Pleiades, "fleeing the mighty strength of Orion," plunge into the misty sea — their setting — the sailing season is over and the winter storms are coming, and a prudent man draws his ship up onto the land and waits. Their spring rising opened the sea to shipping; their autumn setting closed it. So the two halves of their myth answer each other exactly: the sisters who flee Orion through the story are the same stars that, "fleeing Orion," sink into the sea to end the sailing year. The Pleiades were the hinge of the working calendar of the whole ancient Mediterranean — the star-clock by which a world without almanacs knew when to sail, when to reap, and when to plough.</p>
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</div></section><section class="prose-section" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Worship — Ancient</h2><div class="prose-body" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2>Nymphs of the sky, honoured in the calendar</h2>
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<p>The Pleiades had little in the way of formal, altar-based cult of their own — they were nymphs and stars rather than Olympian gods to be petitioned — but they were woven so deeply into the practical and religious life of the ancient world that their "worship" is better understood as their constant use. As the great <strong>seasonal markers</strong> of the agricultural year, their risings and settings governed the rhythm of festivals, sowings, and harvests across Greece; to watch for the Pleiades and time one's labour by them was itself a kind of piety, an attention to the order the gods had written in the sky. Hesiod's whole farmer's almanac is built on them, and behind the practical instruction lies a religious sense that the seasons are divinely appointed and the stars are their appointed signs.</p>
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<h2>Star-sisters in genealogy and local cult</h2>
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<p>Where the Pleiades were honoured as figures, it was usually through their <strong>children</strong> and the cities that claimed descent from them. <strong>Taygete</strong> was remembered in Laconia, where <strong>Mount Taygetus</strong> bore her name and where she was linked to the cult of Artemis (to whom, one story said, she fled for refuge from Zeus); the Spartans traced their founder Lacedaemon to her. <strong>Electra</strong> was honoured wherever the Trojan and Samothracian lines that sprang from her son <strong>Dardanus</strong> were remembered, and she was drawn into the mysteries of <strong>Samothrace</strong> as a mother-figure of the island's sacred kings. <strong>Maia</strong>, the eldest, received honour as the mother of <strong>Hermes</strong> — her name became a title of a nurturing goddess and, through the Roman calendar, was attached to the month of <strong>May</strong> (Maius). So the Pleiades were venerated less at shrines of their own than as the divine ancestresses standing at the head of the genealogies of Sparta, Troy, Boeotia, and Arcadia — the star-mothers of the founding houses.</p>
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<h2>Reading the sky as sacred sign</h2>
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<p>Above all the Pleiades belonged to the ancient discipline of watching the heavens. Their <strong>heliacal rising</strong> (the first dawn on which the cluster becomes visible again before sunrise, after weeks lost in the sun's glare) and their setting were noted and named across the Greek and Roman world, and used to fix the dates of the sailing season, the harvest, and many a local festival. To know the Pleiades was part of the shared inheritance of farmer, sailor, and priest alike; and the small, faint, unmistakable cluster — easy to find, hard to count — kept its hold on the religious imagination precisely because it sat at the crossing of the practical and the mysterious, a clock and a riddle at once.</p>
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</div></section><section class="prose-section" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Worship — Modern</h2><div class="prose-body" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2>The Seven Sisters, still overhead</h2>
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<p>The Pleiades are among the very few figures of Greek myth that anyone can still go outside and see. The cluster the Greeks named for the seven sisters is a real and beautiful object — a knot of hot young blue stars in the constellation <strong>Taurus</strong>, one of the nearest and most conspicuous star-clusters to Earth — and it still carries the name "the <strong>Pleiades</strong>" or "the <strong>Seven Sisters</strong>" in English astronomy, with the individual stars formally named <strong>Alcyone</strong>, <strong>Maia</strong>, <strong>Electra</strong>, <strong>Taygeta</strong>, <strong>Celaeno</strong>, <strong>Sterope</strong>, and <strong>Merope</strong> after the sisters, together with <strong>Atlas</strong> and <strong>Pleione</strong> for their parents. The ancient riddle survives in the fact that most people can pick out only six stars with the naked eye; the "<strong>Lost Pleiad</strong>" is now a piece of folklore attached to a genuine observation, and skywatchers still repeat the old stories of Merope's shame or Electra's grief to explain the missing seventh.</p>
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<h2>A calendar older than the calendar</h2>
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<p>What the Pleiades meant to Hesiod's farmer they have meant to peoples all over the world, and often still do: because the cluster's risings and settings fall at seasonally useful moments, cultures across the globe have independently used it as a seasonal and agricultural marker and as the anchor of festivals. In the modern Hellenic and broader Pagan revival, the Pleiades are honoured in this old key — as the star-clock of the turning year, their spring rising greeted as the opening of the warm season and their autumn setting marking its close — and as the seven nymph-daughters of Atlas whose names still hang in the sky. A devotee might simply go out on an autumn or winter night, find the little misty cluster high in the east, and remember the seven sisters and the hunter who follows them still.</p>
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<h2>The doves in art, poetry, and the wider sky</h2>
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<p>The Pleiades have never left Western art and letters: they glimmer through poetry from Sappho — who watched "the moon has set, and the Pleiades" as she lay awake alone — to Tennyson, who saw them "rising through the mellow shade... glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." Their name has been given to poets (the Pléiade of Renaissance France, the seven-star grouping of Alexandrian tragedians), to a Japanese automobile marque (Subaru, the Japanese name for the same cluster, whose badge shows the six visible stars), and to countless ships, telescopes, and observatories. The seven sisters and the hunter who pursues them remain, as they were for Homer and Hesiod, among the first constellations a person learns to name — the doves fleeing across the sky, the calendar of the ancient year, and the tender riddle of the star that hides.</p>
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</div></section><section data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Epithets & Cult Titles</h2><ul class="epithets" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><span class="epithet-title" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Ἀτλαντίδες (Atlantides) — "the daughters of Atlas"</span> — The commonest collective name for the seven after their father, the Titan Atlas who holds up the sky; it marks their descent and sets them beside their half-sisters the Hyades, also called Atlantides. To be an Atlantis is to be a star-daughter of the sky-bearer</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><span class="epithet-title" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Πλειάδες (Pleiades) — "the doves" / "the sailing-stars"</span> — The name proper, glossed in antiquity two ways at once: peleiades, the flock of "doves" that Orion chased until the gods turned them to stars, and from plein, "to sail," the stars whose rising opened and whose setting closed the sailing season. Both readings are ancient and both are true to what the cluster meant to the Greeks</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><span class="epithet-title" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Ἑπτάποροι (Heptaporoi) — "the seven-pathed" / "the seven sisters"</span> — A descriptor for the seven who travel the sky together; the "Seven Sisters" is the name the cluster still carries in English. Seven were born, though the eye sees only six clearly — the riddle of the "Lost Pleiad"</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><span class="epithet-title" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Πελειάδες πέλειαι (the star-doves)</span> — The Pleiades imagined as a flock of wild doves forever fleeing the hunter Orion across the night sky, the poetic image that binds the catasterism-myth to the name</li></ul></section><section data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Sources & Variants</h2><ul class="sources" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Hesiod, Works and Days 383–384 (the rising of the Pleiades marks the harvest, their setting the ploughing) and 619–620 (their setting, 'fleeing the might of Orion,' ends the sailing season)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Hesiod, Astronomia (fragments) — the seven daughters of Atlas named, and the myth of their catasterism and pursuit by Orion</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Homer, Iliad 18.485–486 (the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion worked into the sky on the shield of Achilles)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Homer, Odyssey 5.272–275 (Odysseus steers by the Pleiades, Boötes, and the Bear)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.10.1 (the seven Pleiades named — Maia, Electra, Taygete, Sterope, Celaeno, Alcyone, Merope — as daughters of Atlas and Pleione, with their unions with Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, and the mortal Sisyphus, and the children they bore)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.10.2 (Maia, eldest of the Pleiades, bears Hermes to Zeus in the cave of Cyllene)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catasterismi 23, and Hyginus, Astronomica 2.21 and Fabulae 192 (the catasterism of the Pleiades; the seven-year pursuit by Orion; the Lost Pleiad — Merope hiding for shame at her mortal marriage, or Electra veiling herself in grief at the fall of Troy)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Pindar, Nemean 2.10–12 (the Pleiades rising near Orion in the sky)</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Sappho fr. 168B (the poet awake at night: 'the moon has set, and the Pleiades')</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Ovid, Fasti 4.169–178 and 5.599–602 (the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione; the dim seventh star; their risings in the Roman calendar) — Roman retelling</li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Aratus, Phaenomena 254–267 (the seven sisters named in the sky, though 'six only are seen by the eyes,' with the tradition of the lost seventh)</li></ul></section><section class="explore" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><h2 class="kicker" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Explore Related Figures</h2><ul class="chips" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><a class="chip" href="/deity/atlas" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Atlas</a></li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><a class="chip" href="/deity/calypso" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Kalypsō</a></li><li data-astro-cid-wdanigbj><a class="chip" href="/deity/maia" data-astro-cid-wdanigbj>Maia</a></li></ul></section></main><footer class="site-footer"><small>A genealogy of the Greek divine</small></footer></body></html> |