Part 16
Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and ‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the Children of Water.
To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words I read to-day in a translation of the _Bhagavad Gita_:--‘I am in the hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One is the Imperishable.’
The unconcerned One!
WINTER STARS
I
To know in a new and acute way the spell of the nocturnal skies, it is not necessary to go into the everlasting wonder and fascination of darkness with an astronomer, or with one whose knowledge of the stars can be expressed with scholarly exactitude. For the student it is needful to know, for example, that the Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta, etc., of _Tauri_, and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as one sits before the fireglow, with one’s book in hand to suggest or one’s memory to remind, it is in another way as delightful and as fascinating to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson in _Ulysses_ speaks of this stellar cluster as
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea....”
or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them
“As when the seaman sees the Hyades Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds, Auster and Aquilon with wingëd steeds....”
to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ‘the Moist Daughters,’ or how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called them ‘the Boar-Throng.’ One must know that Alpha of Boötes is the astronomical signature of the greater Arcturus, but how much it adds to the charm of this star’s interest for us to learn that among its popular names are the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to know why these now familiar names were given and by whom. One may grasp the significance of the acquired knowledge that this vast constellation of Boötes stretches from the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and the numeration of its degrees in declination and ascension, and (if one may thus choose between the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it contains a hundred stars visible to the naked eye. But, for some of us at least, there is something as memorable, something as revealing, in a line such as that of the Persian poet Hafiz, as paraphased by Emerson,
“Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear”--
or that superb utterance of Carlyle in _Sartor Resartus_,
“What thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting Dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?”
Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers after astronomical knowledge should depend on the poets and romancers for even an untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full of misstatements concerning the moon and stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying within the reach of a knowledge achieved since his day: or as Tennyson is accurate. Carlyle himself, quoted above in so beautiful a passage, has made more than one strange mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student astronomer: not only, as in one instance, making the Great Bear for ever revolve round Boötes, but, in a famous passage in his _French Revolution_, speaking of Orion and the Pleiades glittering serenely over revolutionary Paris on the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion did not on that occasion rise till daybreak. It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that her crescents and risings and wanings are to most poets and novelists apparently an inexplicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge. Even a writer who was also a seaman and navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in one of his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in the early evening. The great Shakespeare himself wrote of the Pole Star as immutable, as the one unpassing, the one fixt and undeviating star--
“... constant as the Northern Star, Of whose true fixed and lasting quality There is no fellow in the firmament.”
This was, of course, ignorance of what has since been ascertained, and not uninstructedness or mere hearsay. Possibly, too, he had in mind rather that apparent unchanging aloofness from the drowning sea-horizon to which Homer alludes in the line beautifully translated ‘Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave’ ... of which, no doubt, our great poet had read in the quaint delightful words of Chaucer (rendering Boetius)--‘Ne the sterre y-cleped “the Bere,” that enclyneth his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde, ne the same sterre Ursa nis never-mo wasshen in the depe westrene see, ne coveitith nat to deyen his flaumbe in the see of the occian, al-thogh he see other sterres y-plounged in the see.’
That constellation ‘y-cleped the Bere,’ how profoundly it has impressed the imagination of all peoples. In every age, in every country, our kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas, from caverns and camp-fires and great towers, have watched it ‘incline its ravishing courses’ about the Mountain of the North, ‘coveting not’ to drown its white fires in the polar seas. Here, however, it is strange to note the universality of the Ursine image with the Greeks and Romans and the nations of the South, and the universality with the Teutonic peoples of designations such as the Wain and the Plough. It was not till the Age of Learning set in among the Northern peoples that the classic term came into common use. Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy the writer, in adopting the Greek Arctos (still used occasionally instead of the Bear), adds ‘which untaught men call Carleswæn,’ that is Charles’s Wain, the Waggon. A puzzling problem is why a designation which primarily arose from an association of the early Greeks concerning Arkas, their imaginary racial ancestor, with Kallisto his mother, who had been changed into a great bear in the heavens, should also suggest itself to other peoples, to races so remote in all ways as the North American Indians. Yet before the white man had visited the tribes of North America the red men called the constellation by names signifying a bear. The historian Bancroft has proved that alike among the Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, among the Eastern Narragansett nations and among the nations of the Illinois, the Bear was the accepted token.
Boötes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor, these great constellations, with their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones or the Seven Hounds of the North, and the Pole Star--
“By them, on the deep, The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships”--
and in like fashion all the races of man since Time was have ‘gathered’ the confusing ways of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely lands.
But best of all, to know this spell of the nocturnal skies, one should be in the company of fisher-folk or old seamen or shepherds, perchance unlettered but wise in traditional lore and leal to the wisdom of their fathers. How much more I value what I have heard from some shepherd on the wide dark moors, or from some islesman in a fishing-coble or drifting wherry, on moonless nights filled with a skyey ‘phosphorescence’ as radiant as that a-dance and a-gleam in the long seethe of the wake of a ship, than what I have found concerning scientific star-names in books of astronomy. Nothing that I have since learned of ‘the Pointers’ has impressed me so much as what I learned as a child of ‘the Hounds of Angus,’ nor, in later and fuller knowledge of Polaris, has the child’s first knowledge of the mystery and wonder of ‘the Star of Wisdom,’ as pointed out and tale-told by an old Hebridean fisherman, or of ‘the House of Dreams,’ as sung to me in a forgotten ballad by a Gaelic woman of Argyll, been surpassed.
It was they--herdsmen and mariners, the wayfarer, the nomad, the desert-wanderer--who, of old, gave these names to which the nations have grown used. It was with the nomad that astronomy began. The Chaldæan shepherd, the Phœnician mariner, studied the stars and named them and the great constellations which group themselves from horizon to horizon in the nocturnal skies. They perceived strange symmetries, symbolic images, grotesque resemblances. The same instinct made the Arab of the Desert call the Pleiades the Herd of Camels, made the Akkadian call them the Wild Doves, made the Celtic hunter call them the Pack of Hounds, made the Teuton peasant call them the Hen and Chickens, made the Australian savage call them (in conjunction with the Bear) Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing: the same instinct, this, as made the ancient poet of the Zend-Avesta call them the Seven Beneficent Spirits, or made the modern poet of _Locksley Hall_ liken them to a swarm of fireflies, or made the Gaelic poet of to-day image them as the Herring-Net. In a word, the instinct of poetry: which is as deep as hunger and thirst, as deep as love, as deep as fear, as deep as the desire of life. The instinct of the imagination to clothe the mysterious and the inexplicable in the raiment of the familiar or of recognisable and intimate symbol.
How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-names such as Aldebaran, Alcyone, Polaris, to know that to the swarthy nomads of the desert it imaged itself as one following in a skyey desert, a camel-driver tracking lost camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior following a foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the difficult ways of God, so that no name seemed to them so apt as _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: or to know that to the pastoral Akkadians or the early tillers and hunters of sea-set Greece, looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in its lovely group suggested the Nest of the Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood there on a windless wave-unreached nest till once again ‘the Halcyon days’ of calm settled on land and sea: or to know that to our own seafaring folk of old, the men who voyaged perilously in small and frail craft without compass and with little knowledge of the mysterious laws of the mysterious forces of earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the one unchanging skyey beacon, the steadfast unswerving North Star; and, so, lovingly called by our old Saxon forbears the _Scipsteorra_, the Ship-Star, and by the Elizabethan seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by the Hebridean fishermen the Home-Star, and by others the Star of the Sea.
“Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go. Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set. Alone in thy cold skies, Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train, Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main. On thy unaltering blaze The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost, Fixes his steady gaze, And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast; And they who stray in perilous wastes by night Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.”
The same spirit which animated Bryant when he wrote these verses in his beautiful ‘Hymn to the North Star,’ or made one of the Gaelic island-poets allude to it as the Star of Compassion, prevailed with these Chaldæan shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They gave the familiar or beautiful names of love or intimate life, and in exchange the taciturn face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of silence, and the Night became a comrade, became the voice of the poets, of the sages, of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways of the Unknown.
The Hunter, the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain--how much more we love Boötes, or, as Chaucer called the constellation, ‘ye sterres of Arctour,’ because of these simple names. The Herdsman, the Hunter, ... the words strike the primitive music. The youth of the world is in them. In these few letters what infinite perspectives, what countless images. The Golden Age lies hid in their now impenetrable thickets. Through their branches we may look at the tireless hunter of to-day on the interminable pampas, at the bowed trailer in the dim savannahs of the Amazon, at the swarthy nomad on the wastes of Sahara guarding his camels like ships becalmed in a vast sea of sand, or may see the solitary mountain-shepherd in the hill-wildernesses of Spain or Italy, or the Northern herdsman toiling against wind and snow on our Gaelic hills.
Here also is the romance of the stars, as well as that deeper and perturbing romance which is disclosed to us in the revelations of science. That sense of incalculable distances, of immeasurable periods, of unknown destinies and amazing arrivals, which haunts the imagination of the astronomer when he looks beyond the frontiers of ascertained knowledge, half-doubting perhaps whether even that be not a terrible illusory logic, is also here. One goes back, as in thought one recedes into the beautiful, impassioned wonderland of childhood. One seems to see mankind itself as a child, gone but a little way even yet, looking up trustfully or fearfully to the mysterious mother-eyes of a Face it cannot rightly discern, in its breath being Immortality, Eternity in its glance, and on its brows Infinitude.
WINTER STARS
II
Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is Polaris, the Pole Star or Lodestar: of all winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little Dipper (to give the common designations), Orion, and the lovely cluster of the Pleiades, are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly observed stellar groups. One of our old Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing towards the close of the fifteenth or early in the sixteenth century, thus quaintly brought them into conjunction--
“Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane, Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane, The fiers Orion with his goldin glave.”
Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar and Arcturus (or, as often given in the North, ‘Arturus’ or ‘Arthur’ ... a word itself signifying the Great or Wondrous Bear) were often confused. Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole constellation of Ursa Major--or, as we commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as, for example, in Scott’s lines:
“Arthur’s slow wain his course doth roll, In utter darkness, round the Pole.”
But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not mean this to be understood, for in the second line he speaks of ‘Charlewane,’ _i.e._, Charles’s Wain ... the Wain or Waggon being then, as it still is among country-folk, even more familiar a term than the Great Bear or than the Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in mind the Pole Star, the ‘House of Arthur’ of the ancient British. His choice of the ‘rain-betokening Hyades’ may be taken here as including the Pleiades, these ‘greater seven’ in whom centres so much poetry and old legend. A previous paper has been devoted to the Milky Way, so that there is no need to explain why Watling Street should be analogous with the Galaxy. The ‘Horne’ is the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. Than ‘fierce Orion with his glistering sword’ there is no constellation so universally familiar. If, then, to this category of the old Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran, and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, we have more than enough Winter Lights to consider in one chapter.
Having already, however, dealt with ‘the watery constellations’ we can be the more content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta, Electra, and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus. This great constellation is one of the earliest in extant astronomical records: the earliest, it is believed. The stellar image of a Bull has occurred to many nations since the designation first arose among the ancient Cretans or Akkadians--if, indeed, in its origin it was not immeasurably more remote. East and West, in the deserts of the South and among the grey isles of the North, ‘the Bull’ was recognised. To-day the Scottish peasant still calls it ‘the Steer,’ as his German kinsman does in _der Stier_, his French kinsman in _le Taureau_, his Spanish or Italian kinsman in _Toro_. When certain of the Greeks and Latins used _Keráon_ and _Cornus_ instead of _Tauros_ and _Taurus_, they said merely the same thing--the Horned One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises the image in the first ‘Georgic’:
“When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes The year....”
just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful ‘Hymn to Taurus,’ writes:
“... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey The glinting of thy horn And sullen front, uprising large and dim Bent to the starry Hunter’s sword at bay.”
Among our own ancestors, the Druids made Taurus an object of worship, the Tauric Festival having been one of the great events of the year, signalised when the sun first entered the imagined frontiers of this constellation. To-day, among the homesteads of our Scottish lowlands, the farm-folk tell of the Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the gloaming on New Year’s Eve and move slowly to the dark pastures which await his coming.
The particular stellar glory of this constellation is Aldebaran. This beautiful star has appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I do not know what were its earliest Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names. But as in Gaelic it is sometimes called ‘the Hound,’ this term may well be a survival from ancient days. If so, there is an interesting relation with the primitive Arabic name by which it is all but universally known. Aldebaran is _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: and, figuratively, a follower could hardly be better symbolised than by a hound. I recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis where the analogy is still further emphasised, for there Aldebaran is called ‘the Hound of the Pleiades,’ which is exactly what the Arabian astronomers implied in ‘the Follower.’ Another interesting resemblance is between ‘the red hound’ of the Gaelic poet and legend and the _Rohinī_ of the Hindûs, that word signifying ‘a red deer’ ... in each case the ruddy gleam of the star having suggested the name. Probably it was this characteristic which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the name ‘Lampadias’ or the Torch-Bearer. In the narration of folk-tales I have more than once or twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as the star of good fortune, of ‘the golden luck.’ With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and may be seen at its finest from the latter part of January till the approach of the vernal equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be gained from the fact that this is thrice the outflow of the Pole Star. How often I have stood on a winter’s night, and watched awhile this small red ‘torch’ burning steadfastly in the unchanging heavens, and thought of its vast journeys, of that eternal, appalling procession through the infinite deeps: how often I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery when, watching its silent fire in what appears an inexorable fixity, I recall what science tells us, that it is receding from our system at an all but unparalleled velocity, a backward flight into the unknown at the rate of thirty miles a second.
It would be hopeless to attempt here even the briefest account of the primitive and diverse nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of Orion ... the Winter-Bringer, as this constellation is called in an old Scandinavian saga, identical thus with the marginal reading in the Geneva Bible relative to the reference to Orion in Job--‘which starre bringeth in winter,’ an allusion to its evening appearance at the season of cold and storms. For these things are writ in the records of a hundred nations. They are alive in the poetry of all peoples. Centuries before our era, when Thebes was the greatest city of Greece, the poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior, the Great Hunter, whose nightly course was so glorious above the dusky lands and waters of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek poets, Catullus and Horace gave it a like preeminence in Latin literature. In our own poetry, many surely will recall from _Paradise Lost_:
“... when with fierce winds Orion arm’d Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry....”
or Tennyson’s beautiful line in _Locksley Hall_:
“Great Orion sloping slowly to the west....”
or, it may be, that epic of ‘Orion’ upon which is based Richard Hengist Horne’s claim to remembrance--or, once more, Matthew Arnold’s fine allusion to Sirius and Orion in _Sohrab and Rustum_:
“... the Northern Bear, Who from her frozen height with jealous eye Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South.”
Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had identified Orion both with Horus and Osiris. Among the peoples of Israel the poets acclaimed the constellation as Nimrod, ‘the mighty Hunter’ (or by another term signifying the Giant), ‘bound to the sky for rebellion against Jehovah.’ Among the Celtic races it has had kindred names, sometimes abstract, sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A year or so ago I was told a sea-tale of the Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to this constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is of especial interest, because of its connection with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a modern, not an ancient tale, though with more than one strange old survival) the major position is not held by Fionn, but by the Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is represented as succumbing under the spear thrust in his left side by the enraged Fionn, at last in grips with the daring chieftain who had robbed him of Grania. When questioned, my informant said he had heard a variant of this attribution, and that the constellation was an image of Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a swoon, because she and her lover have been overtaken by the wrath of Fionn ... though from the description I could not make out whether the latter indicated the star Sirius, or the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The Gaels of old called Orion _Caomai_, a name said to signify the Armed King: while the _Gall_ (the Scandinavian races) applied the name _Orwandil_, but with what signification I do not know, though I have read somewhere that it stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.
Of the chief stars in Orion there is not space here to speak. But of the splendid Rigel--as affluent in the mysterious science of the astrologer as in nocturnal light--pearly Anilam, of the Belt or Sword--ominous Bellatrix--ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze--of these alone one might write much ... as one might write much of the Girdle or Staff itself, what Scott in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ calls ‘Orion’s studded belt.’ It has a score of popular names, from the Danish Frigge Rok (Freya’s Distaff) to the seamen’s ‘Yard-arm,’ as, collectively, its three great stars have all manner of names in different countries, from the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three Marys, to The Rake of the French Rhinelanders or the Three Mowers of the Silesian peasant.