‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:
> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.
These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
[2] https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...
A cluster on the other hand actually is a group of stars that formed from the same material and are thus very close to each other.
So there is a difference, but it's only a problem to interchange the terms the other way round.
A cluster could be treated as a constellation, but not vice versa.
For example, the Pleiades has a core radius of only about 8 light years, and almost all of the 1,000+ stars in the cluster are within a volume of radius 43 light years.
A constellation is a two-dimensional region of the sky, more like counties or states on a map. The "celestial sphere" is divided into 88 constellations, which were chosen essentially arbitrarily, based largely on historically significant apparent groupings of stars.
Stars in a constellation superficially look to us as though they're near each other, but they may be very different distances from us, because we see the night sky as two-dimensional.
For example, one of the furthest stars visible to the naked eye is over 16,000 light years away, called V762 Cas in the constellation Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia also contains many other stars that are much closer to us, such as Eta Cassiopeiae which is just 19.4 light years away, practically a next-door neighbor.
The Australians encountered multiple non-homo-sapiens species on their way to Australia and might have even picked up better vision from them. They do apparently have better temperature regulation suited to desert nights.
There are plenty of fields where we entertain "mysteries" that have perfectly rational explanations but settling the question once and for all with a rational argument would dry up the funding stream for accademicians and could have other undesirable consequences on some countries' political narrative.
And then it a sense of incredulity is showing, it's unimaginable, 100,000 kya is unimaginable, as if the world was fashioned in the mesolithic.
Who, if I remember correctly, are estimated to have settled about 50kya. There are later intrusions into the peninsula, as it were back then. Oceania was settled even later by boat. The language divide in Australia is overwhelmingly that of earlier indians (if you'll excuse the pun, the land bridge was connected to the Indian subcontinent), with other language families mostly limited to the north end
This I think might strengthen the argument significantly.
> There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them “Seven Sisters" even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars?
Most people see six bright stars, like those depicted in the Subaru logo. Yet, you are quite correct to point out that the overlapping stars in question, Atlas and Pleione, are named after the parents of the seven sisters in Greek mythology. Six-vs-Seven or Eight-vs-Nine are valid criticisms and raise the question of when the names of the stars were first used.
The narrative-based approach is imprecise but, like Historical Linguistics [2], it might be useful in identifying origins and connectedness. Regardless, knowing that the bright stars Atlas and Pleione were separated in the past is a useful fact for generating and testing hypotheses.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
For example the remnant of Tycho Brahe's supernova is at about 8000 light-years from us [1].
[..] Babylonian astronomy collated earlier observations and divinations into sets of Babylonian star catalogues, during and after the Kassite rule over Babylonia. These star catalogues, written in cuneiform script, contained lists of constellations, individual stars, and planets. The constellations were probably collected from various other sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of Akkad, of Amurru, of Elam and others. Various sources have theorized a Sumerian origin for these Babylonian constellations, but an Elamite origin has also been proposed.[..]
MUL is ‘three stars each’ and Pleiades was a cluster of stars which is ‘star of stars’. MUL.MUL. While star was depicted as three star(looks like three asterisks), Pleiades was represented as twice that.. two MULs or six stars.
This could be the reason why Pleiades was depicted as six stars even though the cluster has more than 6. Everything came to us from Sumerians tho’
On Sumerian constellations and star names:
http://members.westnet.com.au/gary-david-thompson/page11-4.h...
(I am still reading up on this. Haven’t completed..but pinning the link for ref here if anyone is interested)
It is one of the simpler, more obvious signs to draw. I wouldn't read much into it, although one might argue 6ix was a perfect fit if they could only see six (all most of the time).
[..] The first formal compendia of star lists are the Three Stars Each texts appearing from about the twelfth century BC. They represent a tripartite division of the heavens: the northern hemisphere belonged to Enlil, the equator belonged to Anu, and the southern hemisphere belonged to Enki. The boundaries were at 17 degrees North and South, so that the Sun spent exactly three consecutive months in each third. The enumeration of stars in the Three Stars Each catalogues includes 36 stars, three for each month. The determiner glyph for "constellation" or "star" in these lists is MUL (𒀯), originally a pictograph of three stars, as it were a triplet of AN signs; e. g. the Pleiades are referred to as a "star cluster" or "star of stars" in the lists, written as MUL.MUL, or MULMUL (𒀯𒀯).[..]
Further clarification: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUL.APIN
Also: sun is Ut or Utu in the epic of Gilgamesh in early Mesopotamian pantheon and later became Shamash in Sumerian/Babylonian
Quoting from an article on their eyesight:
> As an example of how extraordinary the vision can be, Professor Taylor recounted how astronomers were looking at records from the 1840s into Aboriginal descriptions of constellations of stars.
> "The astronomers just couldn't work out how these constellations worked," he said.
> "They talked to me then they went back with binoculars and suddenly they could pick out all the missing stars that the Aboriginal people could see just with the naked eye."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru...
I have a pet (similarly highly speculative) theory that the Nephilim[1] of the Bible might be a earlier oral history of Neanderthals. But I'll just leave it at that, speculation.
I believe there's also a theory that the neanderthals were smarter than our ancestors of the time. That would also fit the story. I can imagine the homo sapiens of the time interacting with the far stronger and smarter neanderthals and describing them as 'sons of god'. I wonder if that's also where the old Greek myths of Hercules (etc) came from.
But If you ask Jews, who wrote that section of the Bible, benei elokim translates as something like “those who are free”:
“Who or what exactly are the benei elokim? Who are the nephilim? How are they related to each other? And what does it all mean?
One thing benei elokim does not mean is “sons of G‑d.” In fact, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai would “curse” anyone who translated the term benei elokim as the “sons of G‑d.”1 The word elokim in Scripture, while generally referring to G‑d, is in essence merely an expression of authority.2 Similarly, the term benei does not necessarily mean “sons,” but is often just a title. Benei chorin, for example, means those who are free—not “sons of freedom.”
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1987422/jewis...
> It gets passed around as legit probably because it enforces the idea that Christ is a son of God.
I've never heard of that before. Not sure where you would have, or how it even does reenforce that idea.
It reinforces “Christ as the son of God” because, if the phrase is translated as “sons of God”, that sets a precedent in the Old Testament that God has sons. The Jews do not believe God has sons. Christians do. So it is in the best interest of Christian translators to translate that phrase as “sons of God”.
> but the claim that the translation "sons of god" is specifically wrong only seems to be based on the declaration of a single earlier source.
No, I only provided one source (Chabad), but there are many others, including all Jewish translations of the Old Testament (Torah) from the original Hebrew to English. You’ll never see it translated as “sons of God” in a book translated by Jews.
But I have always been under the impression that the christians claim jesus is the only son of their god?
Wouldn't other sons conflict with this and not reinforce it?
„The Christian doctrine of the Trinity […] holds that God is one God, but three coeternal and consubstantial persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The three persons are distinct, yet are one ‚substance, essence or nature‘. In this context, a ‚nature‘ is what one is, whereas a ‚person‘ is who one is“, from [0] where you can also read a lot more about it.
Do the 70 Jewish authors of the Septuagint not count? In the LXX, it clearly reads "οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ", "the sons of God". The LXX precedes Christianity by quite some time.
Also, Christianity considers all people to be children of God (though apparently not "begotten"). On top of that, almost every Christian interpretation of the Bible seems to skip over that mention of the nephilim like it's not there. There's far more reason for Christianity to argue against translating this as "sons of God" than for it.
I just checked a few Jewish translations of Genesis 6:4.
Jewish translations that use "sons of God":
* The Septuagint 3rd century BCE
* JPS Tanakh 1917
* The Living Torah, Aryeh Kaplan 1981
* Richard Elliott Friedman 2001
* Robert Alter 2004
Translations that translate it otherwise:
* A. J. Rosenberg (Judaica Press) 1969
* Everett Fox 1983
* JPS Tanakh 1985
* Stone Edition of the Tanach 1996
* Chaim Miller 2011
The opposition to reading any of the Hebrew scriptures as referring to "Sons of god" likely arose as a reaction in Rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, both of which (along with Karaite Judaism) arose out of Second Temple Judaism.
The culture and language seems to have spread across large parts of the Indo-European landmass starting maybe 6000 years ago, eventually displacing many older European and Indian cultures respectively among others. It is assumed to be the reason that such disparate pantheons as the Roman, Greek, Norse and Hindu have many common characteristics. One reason for the relative swift and wide spread of the culture is currently speculated to be that the Yamnaya were the first to domesticate the horse and use them to pull wagons (chariots).[2]
While it could be possible that the original pantheon referred to Neanderthals a more rational interpretation seems to me to be that the pantheon is a deified memory of some prominent people in a small group that roamed the plains of present Ukraine many thousands of years ago, a group that came to conquer other groups because of their advanced horsemanship, establishing traditions that in turn achieved a life of their own as traditions and beliefs commonly do. But hey, it is little more than speculation at this point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180509185446.h...
"Despite the popularity of Greek mythology in western culture, Greek mythology is generally seen as having little importance in comparative mythology due to the heavy influence of Pre-Greek and Near Eastern cultures, which overwhelms what little Indo-European material can be extracted from it."
In the specific case of the Greek mythology, these deities have distinct Indo-European parallels: Zeus (Dyēus, Sky Father), Eos (H₂éusōs, Dawn goddess), Helios (Seh₂ul, Sun god), Castor and Pollux ( Divine Horse Twins), and more, enough to at least put central tenets of Greek pantheon largely within the realm of the Indo-European tradition.
The cited quote in isolation gives an incorrect impression in this context.
The replacement aspect of it most probably comes from the Yamnaya that killed almost ALL the men in northern and Central Europe and replaced them.
They are known to have lived in smaller social groups than humans, and trolls are depicted as living in small groups as well.
Neanderthals were larger than humans, and trolls are similarly depicted as large.
Trolls in Scandinavian folklore can be very different depending on local traditions. They can be small people living underground, human size, or giants living in the the mountains. They can be solitary or living in human-like societies.
Literal quote from the Wikipedia article you link: "Trolls may be described as small, human-like beings or as tall as men depending on the region of origin of the story."
You're right that there were other characteristics that were associated with them in some folklore that was not consistent with the Neanderthal hypothesis.
How about:
f) often depicted as smoking pipe, g) living in hills, h) or underneath the earth, i) being rich, j) asking trick questions, k) hating church bells, m) replacing human children with their own, n) wearing read hats, etc.
By no means expert, so happy to be proven wrong.
1. Groups like these were more likely to survive if they were isolated and not occupying territory that the (presumably) more sophisticated Homo Sapiens coveted, so maybe they just didn't get interacted with otherwise. Rama had a Vanavasa (forest-living) and a generally weird out-of-pattern life for the time, so had a slightly higher chance of encountering them.
2. If people in later stories did come in contact with them, they were probably trying to expand their territories or otherwise conquer the land. In that case, the stories are going to mythologize them as savage Asuraas, to give further justification to the conquests.
3. We only have a few stories, of unknown time origin, remaining out of hundreds of thousands of stories told by different groups in different places over the millenia. So even if a significant portion of the stories featured Vaanaraas, it's plausible they might all have been lost before they could reach us.
4. In particular, given that such groups were declining in numbers over time, and the fact that more recent stories are more likely to survive, it makes sense that stories featuring them are more likely to have been forgotten and lost to time.
Even though he is depicted as part of the monkey army, he was really known to be a bear. A bear like giant creature.
He appears again in Mahabharata as the possessor of the Syamantaka Gem that was stolen and was in his possession. They live in a cave and hidden from the rest of the people. He is defeated by Krishna and he accepts defeat. He also offer Krishna his daughter Jambavati’s hand in marriage.
In the Puranas ..after the Ramayana war, all the monkeys and bears who lost their lives were brought back to life and they returned to their abode. Mahabharata is to have happened in a different yuga.
Hanuman keeps appearing in all puranas because he is Chiranjeevi..one without death. And hence more of an archetype than a character in every yuga.
Of course many also think the same of Yeti, Bigfoot, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basajaun
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Basque_language
Perhaps, but it's impossible to prove one way or another. More plausibly, they observed that primates possess a type of intelligence of a kind similar to humans, and therefore were readily adaptable to that role in the story.
What we do know is that fantastical characters with human level sentience in the Ramayana exist primarily to engage the audience and to drive forward the epic's central themes of good vs evil. Fantastical creatures are a pattern of this sort of storytelling across the world. Modern storytellers have used the same technique to great effect, like the various species of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth or George Lucas's Galaxy Far Far Away.
In this way, there is a striking contrast between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, despite emerging from the same cultural milieu as the Ramayana, is a complex human sociological drama without clear lines of good and evil. It makes little use of fantastical species, as their presence would detract from the story's fundamentally human themes. The only non human characters of consequence are gods, but even they are far from perfect and instead exhibit the same flaws as the humans.
There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them.
It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones.
Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among early societies where such skills were important.
"Ah, but can you find the hiding sister?"
Let's consider your rule itself, though first modifying it to the real occams razor which says the simplest answer is probably the real one. Simple is probably more measurable than glamor anyway! So what's the simpler of the two explanations? A complex variation of the story as we now know independently arose in multiple cultures and then everyone forgot the same detail (find the seventh star it's still there), or we've been carrying this story with us since the beginning of humanity? Honestly the later sounds simpler to me. It's breathtaking but sounds entirely plausible so why not?
And a common early eye-test seems far simpler and more believable than a common myth that possibly predates by tens of thousands of years the start of contemporary cognitive parity within our species.
Also, Occam's razor says nothing about which explanation is more likely to be correct. It is simply a sensible rule about which explanation is more useful to go with when you have two that explain the same facts equally well. It's a pretty clear rule in physics when you have actual mathematical models to chose between, it's much too hand-wavy in the soft sciences like anthropology.
Of course, in or near large cities, seeing five or six of the "sisters" is about the best one can hope for.
Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star. One would think star charts are a natural subject for inscriptions predating written language.
Sedentary people developed the ability to keep durable records, and to build megalithic structures to track stellar phenomena, sure; but that's ability, rather than importance.
This is an idea that's been tossed around for a while; it has the problem that ancient Greek discussions agree that there were only six stars visible as long as anyone can recall -- even though the myth said there were seven. So if there was a faded star, it faded prior to 500 BC. (Also, no good candidates for a faded star from modern astronomical studies of the Pleiades.)
Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star.
Rappenglück (1997) suggested that a collection of dots in the Lascaux cave paintings might represent the Pleiades, in part because it's located above the shoulder of an aurochs (i.e., like the Pleiades is located relative to the constellation of Taurus). But there are only six dots.
There are several stars in the 5-6 magnitude range close to the limits of human vision in the Pleiades. Seven is also often a sacred number. We also have precedent for cultures such as the Greeks and Arabs using double stars to test vision, namely Mizar and Alcor[1,2]. The typical limiting magnitude for unaided vision is about 6 under perfect conditions, but some people with exceptional vision can see to mag 7.
So it seems highly plausible that most people could only see six, but they knew there were about 7 because some sharp-eyed people could see them and would tell them so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_and_Alcor#Test_of_eyesig... [2] https://www.surveyophthalmol.com/article/S0039-6257(08)00119...
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20100411083646/http://www.subaru...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100411083646/http://www.subaru...
Unfortunately, trying to find anything more online, such as what exactly the Kojiki says about them, doesn't seem to yield much.
So it is very similar to the lost Pleiad, but the seventh fairy is taken back by her god father.
I don’t see anyone claiming that Subaru means seven sisters. It’s just another name for the same constellation.
So even if we're being very literal, "the one with the two stars at the same time" is an accurate description of both the hidden sister story and the cluster.
https://medium.com/th-ink/how-subarus-became-the-car-for-les...
Nowhere, of course, does it reference Subaru meaning the Pleiades being one of those reasons, because it isn't.
I find it very difficult to believe that any car company in the 90’s targeted the market before they realized they were already winning it.
Or may not.
One important fact: people get accolades and sometimes even direct monetary incentives for finding something that is supposedly "oldest of".
Nobody gets famous or rich by revising "oldest of" dates to a more recent timeline.
They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia.
If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradition draws on the least far-fetched explanation, as science demands.
The same applies to stenciled handprints on cave walls from Spain to Sulawesi, and as many millennia.
Convergent evolution is very common in biology, which has many more degrees of freedom. Why not in culture too?
Culture has overwhelmingly more degrees of freedom than biology, which is constrained by needs to survive and also reproduce. Culture can sustain things like Scientology, Anime, and Froot Loops, in some places even simultaneously. Similarly, convergent evolution occurs only where environmental forces, such as a precise ecological niche, drive development into a very narrow range of possibilities with radically limited degrees of freedom.
In the total absence of any such constraints, the only viable explanation for detailed similarity across vast distances and dizzying time spans is common heritage.
Also, TFA only says that the aboriginal stories seem to predate European contact, but which is more plausible: that we found a story that is ten times older than the oldest previously reconstructed myth or that we were wrong and the aboriginal story is actually influenced directly or transitively by some European culture (or some other culture which had a similar myth)? This depends on the evidence back the “seems to predate European contact” claim.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/02/27/...
Amazing if true. I got the impression, when I studied (a little) anthropology in the 1990s, that myths were related to the present structure of a society more than to its past, and that you couldn't expect reliable transmission of messages over such long time periods.
Edit: here is a cool article about geomythology - https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorGeomythology.pdf
"... debate raged in the nineteenth century over Native American legends that seemed to contain ancestral memories of mastodons hunted until their extinction in the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The possibility was supported by twentieth-century archaeological discoveries of mammoth kill sites that matched local tribal lore about elephant-like monsters."
Frist candidate for an explanation:
* Stories get passed on and some are surprisingly stable.
Second candidate for an explanation:
* The underpinnings of the architecture of the mind cause the same stories to (re?)surface everywhere.
Let's use occams razor.
(I don't claim this argument disproves the "theory" of archetypes. But we should not jump to conclusions when applying it out of context.).
That's reasonable. While certainly far from proven, the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis[0] posits the possibility that the "Great Flood" story, which is part of many ancient traditions (and long predates Abrahamic[1] religions) may be from an oral tradition recounting a flood occurring at the end of the last glaciation in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
While that story certainly isn't anywhere near 100,000 years old, if true, it does add credence to the stability of oral traditions over long periods of time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions
Edit: Clarified hypothesized location of the Black Sea Deluge.
Here's some hyperbole explaining why the first point offers the simpler explanation.
To use the old south park meme:
1. The underpinnings of the architecture of the mind
2. ?
3. Stories resurfacing.
vs
1. narrative tradition
But what if all that knowledge and experience of writing technology and writing based culture were to vanish? What would you be then? Helpless? Lost? Isolated?
Actually, no. You’d still be capable of advanced communications, education, and data storage, using alternative modalities.
It’s like pre-internet humans. They still went out on dates, met up with friends, gossiped and bought things. They just accomplished all that with different tools to what people use today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
People could potentially have superimposed the number seven on the story, as per the rainbow's seven colours and Newton.
Lots of animals are able to count and it's ridiculous to assume that any individual with even a rudimentary language wouldn't be able to.
With which I mean to say that you don't need a formal understanding of 'mathematics' to count.
Further there's nothing mathematically super special about the number 7. You might say "it's a prime, and also X, Y, Z", but there's pretty much an infinite number of properties you could find for any number you choose.
(There are Australian languages with more extensive number words, which is probably where the examples of "Pleiades = 7 women" stories come from.)
Since one moon phase takes that long.
Just like the odds of two people in a group having the same birthday is surprisingly low, so are the odds of different cultures coming up with the same story.
If you add a bit of selection bias, where you ignore all cultures that don't have a seven sisters story and ignore all the other myths that are not similar and you could end up with this unsurprising coincidence.
1. Seven days in a week
2. sailing the seven seas
3. the seven wonders of the world
4. the seven continents
5. seven deadly sins
6. seven sisters
7. the seven canonical exampleshttps://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/106582/harry-potte...
Depending on how one defines the limit of what can be seen, there are either 0 stars, or 6 stars, or 9 stars, or hundreds. But only someone with very, very exceptional eyesight under very, very exceptional conditions can actually see seven stars but not nine.
Source: I've been observing the cluster, and the sky as a whole, for decades. I'll draw the locations of the six notable stars just as easily as some will draw the big dipper. And I've never, in decades of observing under many different conditions from different latitudes, ever seen seven stars.
> And I've never, in decades of observing under many different conditions from different latitudes, ever seen seven stars.
This really only tells us about you. Even if your vision is 20/20, your experience doesn't preclude the possibility of someone else discerning Pleione. And if they can, that ability can definitely be determined by time of year; which affects not only where the Pleiades are in the sky (e.g. how much air mass you're looking through), but also things like turbulence and humidity.
There is a whole spectrum of color, but there are only a handful of colors that most humans distinguish and talk about. It has always seemed odd to me that we elevate Indigo into the spectrum of named colors.
However, Newton was fond of the occult, and numerology, and the number seven. He wrote papers about appearances of the number seven in the Bible.
I think that Newton made Indigo an official color just to bring the number up to 7.
Note that different cultures do not actually agree on 7 colors in the spectrum or which colors they are. For example some languages consider green to be a shade of blue or vice versa, or green to be a shade of yellow. Some only distinguish between hot (red-yellow) and cold (green-blue) colors. There are also some non-spectrum basic colors, for example english considers light-red (pink) and dark-orange (brown) to be basic colors, whereas a dark green is just a shade of green; and this also varies by culture.
Sun, moon, mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, mercury.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/01/why-does-a-week-have-seve...
KING LEAR
Because they are not eight?
Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool.
100,000 year old stories would predate behavioural modernity, thought to have emerged 80,000 years ago.
Maybe eyesight was better 80,000 years ago, so the seven were discernable to the naked eye - combined with zero light and air pollution. OTOH maybe we'll find further evidence to push back behavioural modernity.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
Pleione is five arcmin from the star Atlas, which is about four times brighter than Pleione, and the resulting glare from Atlas prevents most people from seeing Pleione."
Apparent magnitudes:
Pleione 4.77 - 5.50
Taygeta 4.30
Maia 3.87
And Islamic history is 1400 years old.
It's a great way of learning — basically a fairy tale compilation, but the fairy tales are worthy of learning about. Also, the reader learns much about the historical setting.
Would be amazing to write/popularize similar books on other cultures as well. Perhaps the Judge Di series[1] about an 18th century Chinese detective comes close to that.
[0] Staré grécke báje a povesti https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057997-star-gr-cke-b-j...
[1] Judge Dee https://www.goodreads.com/series/50669-judge-dee-chronologic...
No, the series is from the 18th century. Di Renjie lived in the 7th century.
30 years ago seeing stars was a common occurrence for me, now, due to light pollution ?Seems like a rarity.
In Vedic astrology, there are 12 houses and 27 lunar mansions or nakshatras. They are the daughters of Daksha, one of the progenitors of humans. He was also responsible for the procreation of the universe, stars, gods, demons and all things living.
The world is born and destroyed again and again. One day of the creator is one epoch. When he closes his eyes to sleep and rest, a great flood engulfs all the worlds he has created and erases it all.
He dreams up the next world and when he wakes up, he assigns a progenitor to recreate that world. Daksha was one such progenitor.
He gave his 27 daughters in marriage to Chandra, the moon god. Each one of them is a lunar mansion..or part of what we see as a constellation of star in the night sky. The moon visits each one of them every night. That’s why the lunar calender month is 27. There is also a 28th sister who disappeared.
The third daughter is Krittika whose mythology is tied to pleiades. The story goes that Agni, the fire god was the representative of all the gods in heaven. When anyone made a sacrifice, it had to be made to agni who will take it to the heavens and distribute it to all the other gods.
All sacrifices to gods were shared amongst them all and the blessings from the gods will be divided equally amongst those who made the sacrifices. They were consigned to the flames of agni and agni ate up the sacrifices.
Agni was beautiful and resplendent. He was also single and because of his nature coveted everything and ate everything. Every epoch has Seven Sages. They were the ones who represented humans and made sacrifices on their behalf.
The Seven Sages each had a wife. And Agni coveted them all. His flames of desire leapt higher and higher at the sacrifices as he wanted the seven wives for himself. There is also a verse in the vedas that says Agni is the fire with seven tongues. seven flames.
Unbeknownst to Agni, one other daughter of Daksha was infatuated with him. She watched him with unblinking eyes as his flames danced for the seven pious wives of the sages. The desire he could never reach. Just like her...because he didn’t even notice her.
Her name was Swaha. Being a celestial herself, she had the power to shape shift. So one day, she changed her form to resemble the first of the wives. Agni was delighted. They snuck to a celestial magical grove and had a jolly good time. The next day, Swaha took the form of the second wife and went back to their love nest. And again and again. She has taken the form of all six of wives. But try as she might..she couldn’t transform into the seventh one.
Anusuya..the wife was Sage Atri was so chaste that even by sleight of hand and in someone’s imagination, she couldn’t be seen as the illicit lover of a man who wasn’t her husband.
So now the secret was out. Swaha was reprimanded and Agni is now smitten with Swaha. But the lovers are together now. The alter egos Swaha created were left behind in the celestial grove but because they can’t wander in a world where the real wives existed, they were prisoners inside the glorious celestial grove.
Swaha didn’t trust Agni still and insisted that she will be present too at all sacrifices made to agni henceforth so he wasn’t making side eyes at the sages wives. She becomes the gaping mouth of agni who will swallow all the sacrifices. That’s why..even today..all sacrificial fires are fed with incantations that end with ‘swaha’. It is not a sacrifice if Swaha isn’t present.
Meanwhile the six shadow wives live in the grove called Saravana.(sara = thicket of reeds. vana = grove/forest. it was a forest with lakes and a lot of water bodies with thickets of reeds) Shiva and Parvati start visiting it for their love making. Their lovemaking created a spark so bright and hot that it couldn’t be contained in any of the worlds. It was dropped in the cooling waters of Sara Vana. There the krittikas each picked a piece of it and raised them as six babies. When the children were old enough, they merged as one. With six heads and twelve arms to become the warrior god, Muruga aka Kartikeya. The one who came from the krittikas.
The sisters feel that they have nothing else to do and ask that they become stars in the heavens. So muruga flings them into the skies and they become the pleiades cluster. They become one. They are now known as Krittika.
Many snapshot predictions are possible when krittika star is present in astrological chart. The mythology helps me remember them. Without going into details, Elon musk..for example..has a prominent Krittika. And the snapshot techniques archetype fits perfectly. There are many examples.
Tesla, for example..has a moderately similar chart to Elon Musk(and so it was a neat coincidence his star company is called Tesla..they share the same Birth date too altho diff years.)..but it shifts by one nakshatra pada which took his life in an entirely different direction even though they shared ascendents.
I like to think that we are all living in a simulation. And I would very much like astrology to be the code that hacks it. But who knows? I am just reading and learning for now. I don’t know exactly what astrology is but I am certainly not dismissive of it anymore.
Anyways..that’s the Krittika/Pleiades myth in Indian mythology.
for example, i will always look for themes like fostering/IVF/sperm donation/adoption/caesarian etc if there is a prominent or strong krittika ..especially in the first pada of 13 degrees 20' of aries. also in taurus but it would be slightly different as taurus is venus ruled rather than mars ruled aries and hence the significations change entirely.
thats just an example of how mythology and archetype patterning can help like a mnemonic device. however, why it is always accurate is something i haven't been able to crack yet. but that's a different topic.
The soul is untethered and wandering in ashwini...in Bharani it’s bound in the womb, hanging upside down and dependent on the mother for everything. It is undecided and while everyone awaits the arrival...the birth..the fetus chooses when to make its appearance.
In krittika tho’ ..it’s the nakshatra of individuality..the soul is born and possesses independence. It is demanding and curious. The symbol is the knife. It’s the knife that cuts the umbilical cord of the baby to step from a metaphysical existence to a physical existence.
For Krittika prominent charts, the best remedy is to give unselfishly to others. Without calculating. Like agni who was the deliverer of the sacrificial offerings to the gods and humans..his duty being that he has to give equally and fairly to everyone their rightful share. Krittikas will overcome challenges by sharing and being fair.
Another one of my favorite stories to read is the story of Nachiketa and Yama from Katha Upanishad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachiketa It is the archetype of Krittika and Bharani. (Nachiketa and Yama respectively)
Something beautiful happens in the stories. I started reading all the Puranas and Upanishads with a different perspective after I started studying astrology.
I think ..with enough time..I can map all the stories to make sense of a kind of progression of action and karma. It’s all there...only thing tho’.. it’s coded.
I personally find the argument quite weak, but just like a Jules Verne novel, where the science foundation is a bit shaky, at least the argument is good food for thought, food that in this case I find to be quite delicious.
First here's a summary of the argument: the Pleiades are a constellation of stars that are part of various myths in various parts of the world. The authors claim that all these myths talk about seven sisters, but since nowadays only 6 stars are visible, and 100k years ago 7 stars were visible, ergo the myths can trace back to a common origin story.
Second: what are the Pleiades? They are a cluster (a group of gravitationally bound stars) of about 800 stars, about 450 light years away from us. The vast majority of these starts can only be seen with a telescope.
Now let's see what parts of the author's argument are shaky.
1. How many stars are actually visible? According to [2] (which is listed in the preprint's bibliography):
"modern observers [..] can typically discern only six stars in the cluster. But that's simply a consequence of a light-filled night sky. With sharp eyes and a clear, dark sky, it's possible to spot up to 12 stars in the Pleiades group."
2. Which 2 of the stars are currently seen as 1? It's Atlas and Pleione. However, in the Greek myth of 7 sisters, these two stars are actually the father and the mother, they are not part of the 7 sisters per se. What the Greeks called the Pleiades actually had 9 stars, the 7 sisters and the parents. Assuming the parents are seen as a single star, a simple way to reconcile the commonality of the 7 number in different myths is that other people saw these 2 stars as 1 too, but simply did not count the faintest of the remaining 7. That faintest of the remaining 7 is a binary star Asterope that is on the boundary of the constellation (and likely to be below the horizon as seen in Australia for most of the year), so its inclusion in the constellation is kind of arbitrary
3. Why are the 2 stars not visible as distinct? The angular separation between them is about 5 minutes of arc. Humans can resolve up to 1 arcminute. Here's a little experiment: "e". Take a look at that e. There are roughly 2 holes in it separated by one horizontal lines. Look at that "e" from a distance, and see how far you can resolve the 2 holes in it. On my computer the horizontal line appears to be about 0.5 mm thick, and I can resolve the letter at about 1 meter distance. At that distance 1 minute of arc subtends about 0.3 mm in length (2pi = 6.28 meters divided by 36060). There you have it, the experiment that shows you can resolve about 1 minute of arc.
But if the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas is 5 arcminutes, why can't we resolve them? The preprint explains that: the faint star (Pleione) is next to the brighter star (Atlas) and we can't distinguish it because of Atlas's glare. It then goes on to say that in such conditions, the minimum distance for people to be able to see Pleione is 3 or 4 minutes. It somehow concludes that because Pleione is at 5 minutes distance, most people can't distinguish it.
4. How about the past? Pleione is a variable star, its magnitude (brighness) changes. Wikipedia lists a magnitude range of 4.8 to 5.5 (currently at 5.05). Is it possible that it was much brighter during the Ancient Greek period? Well, of course it is possible. The preprint states as such: "we cannot discount the possibility that one of the faint stars was much brighter in the past." And then they proceed to just discount that possibility.
Instead they go for the hypothesis that 100k years ago the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas was higher by 3.4 arcminutes. Now, a very solid principle of numerical calculation is to always be skeptical of extrapolations. Interpolations are fine, but when you see an extrapolation, pay extra attention. Here, the authors extrapolate from the astronomical observations made during the last 50 years to 100k years in the past. 3.4 minutes in 100k years correspond to 0.01 arcseconds in 50 years. Do we have this type of precision? Wikipedia [3] claims we can reach an angular resolution of 0.001 arcseconds using telescope arrays, and it's possible we can do even better now (remember the "imaging" of the black hole about 1 year ago?). But did we have this capability 50 years ago? I'm not so sure.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
[2] https://www.space.com/pleiades.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#Telescope_a...
Any idea why they brand it like this? Who is supposed to take this seriously?
I'm EU-based and here you're not allowed to claim that your organization is a university if it is not recognized by the state as such (roughly speaking).
So yeah it is snake oil now.
Eg you learn to run a team of hamburger flippers at the McDonald's University. Many SaaS startups have a tutorials page named $BRAND University. In that context, a bunch of atheistic reli-nuts calling their clubhouse a university isn't that far off.
I may be swayed that this is more of a "summer workshop" and not as academically rigorous as I'd like, but otherwise I'm not sure why you claim it doesn't deserve the title "University."
The ISU is an accredited University which offers formal Masters degree programs, while Singularity University is not accredited and does not offer formal graduate or undergraduate degree courses.
Just because they can use that title doesn't mean they necessarily should, especially an organization rooted in academia that wants to be taken seriously. Even if it is legitimate and well intentioned, spuriously using the term 'university' and having a disclaimer like 'Singularity University is not a degree granting institution' in fine print definitely doesn't send the right message. I don't think it's an issue of whether they deserve to use that term but it gives the illusion that they're in company with other dubious non-accredited 'universities'. It's just bad optics.
Ideally this story should be changed to this URL which has further comments by the author attached to it. Also The Conversation is a legitimate Australian academic site.
That be as it may, I fail to see anything deceptive in the linked article. The widespread notion that the Pleiades have 7 stars while only 6 are visible is definitely interesting.
Not sure I buy the explanation though (that Pleione would have been visibly separable from Atlas 100.000 years ago, and that the memory of that time has lived on in myth). But they do put a question mark after the claim.
Singularity University is basically an overpriced executive MBA program, mostly paid for by non Americans excited to visit Silicon Valley. For people with infinite money looking for a taste of Silicon Valley and wanting to invest in cutting edge stuff here, their actual educational materials are totally acceptable.
I used to work with their current law and blockchain lecturer.
You mean the labeling that the EU agrees (if reluctantly) to be legal?
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/loophole-california-champagne...
Of course a sovereign country can define (or refrain from defining) a university in any way they like, but the historical argument really doesn't help much there. The historical notion of a university is very much tied to ruling powers.
I've met him and listened to his public lectures at Macquarie University. He has been researching Aboriginal Australian Astronomy for decades and is well published in the arena. He and his wife have traveled all over Oz, gathering stories from the Elders of tribes.
I've heard him talk about the Seven Sisters story from Aboriginal accounts, but one particular story stuck out:
Ray mentioned how one particular elder could individually name 50,000 stars, and he dared any Astrophysicist to mention 5,000.
I'd recommend that the baby not be thrown out with the bath water.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/how-many-stars-n...
Edit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru... (popsci but generally reliable journalism)
I took seminars throughout my career, and a number were dubbed “university” (Like Apple’s famous —and long-defunct— “Developer University” —DU. I still have the certificates they gave me).
Personally, I find it potentially misleading, but seldom actually nefarious. It does dilute the cachet of the word, though.
So yeah, he probably did not grasp what he was taught, but then again, you'd expect a self-proclaimed university to teach its students better than that.
To me, the Singularity University's target audience seems to be execs who need to convince others they are capable of developing a vision.
TLDR summary of article: Plain observation only shows 6 stars not 7 because the 7th is quite dim and close to one of the other stars. 100k years ago it would have been further away from the others. Therefore the story must have originated 100k years ago.
Bollocks and bullshit.
Edit: My bad - I clicked through to another link on the page accidentally
Besides, every text is being altered at each rewrite (before printing technology) and even no story is told two times exactly the same.
Any decent scholar of ancient texts will tell you that. Indian ancient literature is the canonical case study.
I think you're missing the mark here. Advances in archaeogenetics and newly found well preserved specimens have added an enormous amount of detail and color into the origins of anatomically modern humans, even in the past decade or two. I mean, the stone age itself began 2.6 million years ago, and we found that out through archaeological evidence.