Part 15

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.”

As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they enshrine. ‘Seamen’s starres’ our own King Jamie called them, after the popular use. The Finns call them ‘the Sieve,’ and the Provençals ‘the mosquito net,’ and the Italians ‘the Battledore.’ With the nomad Arabs they are ‘the Herd of Camels.’ Peoples so apart as the ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks of Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called them ‘the Dancers’: to the Solomon Islanders they are ‘a group of girls,’ and (strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the Australian aborigines thought of them as ‘Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing.’ There is perhaps no stranger name than our Gaelic _Crannarain_ (though _Grioglachan_ or _Meanmnach_ is more common), _i.e._, the baker’s peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker and his wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth.

But an end to this long excerpting from ‘starry notes’! In a later chapter, too, I propose to write of ‘Winter Stars,’ and the Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way--and I must take warning in time to condense better and write ‘more soothly’ as Chaucer has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation from Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s preface to his _Greek Birds_, to which I have alluded in a footnote. ‘As the White Doves came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile, so over the sea and the islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names. And our Aryan studies must not blind us to the presence in an Aryan tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or from the nameless and forgotten language that was spoken by the gods.’

Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month!

What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd looked up from the illimitable desert and called this dim cluster, this incalculable congregation of majesty and splendour, _Al Najm_, ‘the Constellation’ ... ‘_the_ Constellation’: since the first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit Sahara to bow before _Al Wasat_, the Central One: since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set, changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives ... for not long ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and named them newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace.

THE RAINY HYADES

“Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”

Years ago I remember coming upon this mysterious phrase in a poem or poetic drama by a French writer. The pagans, led by a priest, then went into the woods; and, in a hollow made of a hidden place swept by great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I forget whether the scourge of drought ended then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches, if rains poured through the leaves and mosses and reached the well-springs. I recall only the invocation, and some faint and broken memory of the twilight-procession of bitter hearts and wild voices, weary of vain lamentation and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or silent gods. But often I wondered as to Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous name. Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his name signals, a strayed Latin? And was he, as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a divinity of the clouds, clothed, like the shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as the more secretly to drive before him down the hidden ways of heaven the myriad hosts of the rain? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings of unfalling water, as a visionary once portrayed for me a likeness of Midir, that ancient Gaelic god at whose coming came and still come the sudden dews, or whose presence or the signs of whose passage would be revealed and still are revealed by the white glisten on thickets and grasses, by the moist coolness on the lips of leaf and flower.

The name, too, or one very like it, I heard once in a complicated (and, alas, for the most part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of Manan, the Poseidon of the Gael: remembered because of the singular companionship of three or four other Latin-sounding names, which the old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented or himself introduced, or mayhap had in the sequence of tradition from some forgotten monkish reciter of old. Aquarius and either Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly given as the Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomical company, I remember--and Neptheen or Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his oneness with Manan’s self.

But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as though washed away by one of his waves of rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, till the other day. Then, as it happened, I came upon the name once more, in a Latin quotation in an old book. So, he was of the proud Roman clan after all! and, by the context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal rains, and of those also that at the vernal equinox are as a sound of innumerable little clapping hands.

Could he be an astronomical figure, a Zodiacal prince of dominion, I wondered. In vain I searched through all available pages connected with the Hyades, the Stars of Water: in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius, of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and Pisces and Argo, that proud Ship of March. But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing the first sleet of winter whistle through the dishevelled oaks and soughing firs, when I was idly reading and recalling broken clues in connection with the astrological ‘House of Seturn,’ suddenly, in pursuit of a cross-reference to some detail in connection with the constellation of Capricorn, I encountered Imbrifer once more. ‘Imbrifer, the Rain-Bringing One.’

So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word, is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be ryche and wel lufyd’!

Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many of these October and November days of floods and rains! _Imbrifer_ ... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July, Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November, if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’ or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!

Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.

“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign, Pullst back the Sun....”

as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:

“... Then grievous blasts Break southward on the Sea, when coincide The _Goat_ and _Sun_: and then a heaven-sent cold.”

Many of us will remember with a thrill Milton’s magnificent image

“... Thence down amain As deep as Capricorn,”

and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the _Paradiso_ (relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and February 14).

“_The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun._”

May and November are the two ‘fatal’ months with the Celtic peoples: the first because of the influence of the Queen of Faerie (she has many names), and the second because of Midir, who sleeps in November, or, as another legend has it, ‘goes away’ in that month. In that month too the Daughter of Midir has departed on her long quest of her brother Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a confused traditionary remembrance, or a mytho-poeic invention.... I have come upon it once only), to find him asleep under the shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to woo him with pale arctic fires, and auroras, and a faint music wrought out of the murmur of polar airs on a harp made of a seal’s breast-bone. It is but in another guise the old Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that the touch of Dalua, the Secret Fool or the Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death. Once more, it is in November that Lîr holds his great banquet, a banquet that lasts three months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under the waves. In one way or another all these dreams are associated with the sea, with water and the Winter Solstice. By different ways of thought, of tradition, and of dreaming phantasy, the minds of this race or that people, of these scattered tribes or those broken clans, have reached the same strange goals of the imagination. The spell of Capricorn may be of the Waters of all time, since the Horned Goat of our Celtic forbears, the ‘Buccan Horn’ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the Latin ‘Imbrifer’ or ‘Gelidus’ or ‘Sea-Goat’ (in several variants), the Greek ‘Athalpees’ or the commoner term signifying a Horned Goat, the ancient Egyptian Chnemu, God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient Aztec Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian Munaxa, both signifying Goat Fish--and so forth, East and West, in the dim past and the confused present,--are all directly or indirectly associated with the element of Water, with the Sea, or rains, storm and change and subtle regeneration. The Greek writers called the allied constellation of Aquarius Hydrochoüs, the Water-Pourer, in mythological connection (a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion and the great Flood, that many believe to have been an ancestral memory of the Deluge which submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave it the same name, ‘se waeter-gyt.’ There is a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that dim Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse or drowned Atlantis, to the effect (for I know it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city unloosened to the devouring waves by Dahut the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water shook a fiery rain upon land and sea and that the floods of heaven fell, from the wake of the Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of the unseen tree that bears the silver Apples (the Pleiades), and as far as the hidden Wellsprings (_the Constellation of Capricorn_) and The Mansion of the White King (the Constellation of Aquarius)--the White King being water personified.

Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian analogues for the last named, Aquarius, relate to water. One of the few old-world exceptions was that Roman Zodiac on which the constellation figured as a peacock, symbol of Hêrê (Juno), because that in her month Gamelion (part January, part February) the sun enters this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain Bringer. Another name was Cecrops, because the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by the dews and has its eggs hatched by the vernal rains. It would be wearisome to collate superfluous instances. Enough, now, that the Arab, the Persian, the Syrian and the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene and the Anglo-Saxon in the designation of the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent such as the Arabian _Al Dalw_, the Well-Bucket: that in China of old its sign was recognised as a symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the Chinese Deucalion: and that still among the astrologers of Central Asia and Japan it has for emblem the Rat, the far-Asiatic ideograph for water. Strange too that Star-Seers so remote as the Magi of the East and the Druids of the West should centrate their stellar science on this particular constellation. And, once more, not less strange that alike by the banks of the Euphrates where it was called the Star of Mighty Destiny, on the Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of the Gaul and the Gael where too it symbolised Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star of Fortune--the group alluded to by Dante in the _Purgatorio_:

“... geomancers their Fortuna Major See in the Orient before the dawn ...”

Again, is it tradition or coincidence that the Platonists of old held ‘the stairs of Capricorn’ to be the stellar way by which the souls of men ascended to heaven, so that the constellation became known as the Gate of the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and mystics of the West share the same belief? Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic forbears--the Silver Road, as generally given though obviously very loosely ... and may not the name more likely, especially in connection with a basic legend of the constellation of Corona Borealis, be the ‘Mansion of Ariand’ (Ariadne)? ... though commonly applied to the Milky Way or less often to the Northern Crown, is sometimes in its modern equivalent used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to astrologers, this Constellation with that of Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a certain time ‘the House of Saturn’ is here to be discerned.

It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in a rare book of some 200 years ago, _Meteorologiae_, speaks of Aquarius by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius.

But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the _Seasons_ (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it--so that ‘benign’ and not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet.

All these ‘watery constellations’--Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces--are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky--the clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset of winter--the Lords of Rain--‘sad companions of the turning year’ as an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides, ‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the ‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in Tennyson’s

“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea.”

Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously ‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six storm-stars are torches set apart.