CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAOS AT THE CENTRE OF THE SKY
Death and disaster are soon to be meted out by the returning master of Ithaka in revenge for the predations of the suitors who have violated the sanctity of his hall. This achieved, Odysseus will at last be reunited with Penelope, when he will learn whether his wife has stayed constant in his absence and whether she has preserved the great secret hidden at the heart of their bedchamber. An astronomical connection is the only viable interpretation of an island where an olive tree pillar symbolising the axis of the world is enclosed in the oikos, and where the restitution of order, or the banishment of its antithesis, disorder, provides the climactic dénouement to a series of tragic advancements and failures. The first task of the returning master is to deploy the strength and insight gained during his spiritual transformation to the defeat of the suitors and the restoration of correct social conduct. Much is achieved with the supernatural assistance of his spiritual guide, Athene, the encouragement of Zeus and the robust support of Odysseus’ son and his loyal servants, especially Eumaios and Eurykleia who have maintained the task of ordering outside and within, in the absence or incapacity of Odysseus and Penelope whose task this should properly be. Yet the island has its own inbuilt strength which, if all is well and the secret faithfully preserved, should have guaranteed the integrity of place, and far, far more: the balance of universal order. The symbol of Ithaka’s immutable strength is this very olive tree that grows at the centre of the bedchamber. But does it still stand firm? Understanding the tree may ultimately help us to understand the island. The Ithakan olive occupies the same symbolic territory as the ‘mill tree’ or wooden axle which supported the turning ‘millstone’ of the sky which fell when the millstone broke in two in the Norse legend. And the exhausted miller woman, one of twelve such workers employed to turn the hand mills, but the weakest (20, 105-119) whose audible prayer comes as a good omen to her master Odysseus, may well belong to the same style of precessional myth as the Scandinavian miller-sisters equally worn down by toil.
In the later saga, two strong slave women grind out peace and plenty by turning the millstone in the hall of Frodi. But he, the king, is too greedy; and the millstone, “not come from the Earth,” eventually shatters. It is a Myth of Precession involving the rupture of the stone upon its axle / axis, with the standard array of attendant disasters. The women immediately experience a terrible vision of an approaching enemy host intent on destroying the palace by fire. When the Homeric and Scandinavian ‘palace disasters’ are placed side by side for comparison, it becomes apparent that they may share a common ancestry, for all their temporal distance. But first, we must consider the all-important tree and its role in the denouement of the Epic. The suitors are finally dead, the disobedient servants punished, the hall fumigated and restored to good order. Yet still Penelope has not recognised the wretched beggar standing before her as the husband she longs for. In her continuing grief she refutes the message of the old nurse Eurykleia who announces that Odysseus is home, in the house, having killed the suitors (23, 1-9). She must be mad, exclaims her mistress, driven crazy by the gods, and the excitable servant has disturbed the first happy sleep Penelope has enjoyed since Odysseus departed for Ilion. In fact Penelope is due to ‘awake’ now from the ignorance of the ‘forgetting’ state into which she had fallen, in tune with Odysseus in his dreaming state, the husband with whom she is of one mind. Her joy at the good news is muted by her mistrustful fear that the message may be in error. She must see for herself and she must test the impostor. So queenly Penelope descends from her chamber and finds the un-named beggar seated by the fire at the tall pillar (23, 88-90, just as Arete and Alkinoös sat in their shining hall (6, 305-309) and where Odysseus had previously been seated in the hall of Alkinoös. The victor of the battle in the hall has taken his true place as leader of this Ithakan household, sitting where any true master would sit in affirmation of his kingly identity with the pillar as axis. As part of a subtext, the many parallels with Scheria serve to equate stellar Ithaka with the most important asterism in the northern night sky, the Pole Star. The decision is made to impose a “test of signs that only [they] know of”, which are “secret from others” (23, 109f.) And so the great test of the olive tree bed is set in motion by Penelope with a seemingly casual aside to the servant Eurykleia to make up the bed for Odysseus “outside the well fashioned chamber” (177f., emphasis added). The anger of Odysseus is boundless and he is hurt deeply in his heart. The bed cannot be moved, built as it is around the trunk of a tree growing in the centre of the chamber, thick, like a (stone) column, leaves still growing strongly, curiously still living despite the trimming and planing carried out by Odysseus (190-199).2 No man however strong could possibly move it, yet this is what Odysseus fears. Only a god could achieve such a feat, it is implied, and he has had too much recent experience of malevolent deities to be able to trust their intentions. But of course some cosmic power in the form of a ‘god’ could bring about a disastrous precessional shift. A test of identity is a perfect narrative resolution to the homecoming and a fine prelude to the sweet reunion that follows. But why, we ask, this particularly cryptic format? We have a tree that is a pillar and a bed post, all at the same time. It is a stone column, but once long ago it had bark and leaves, as a tree. The living olive is firmly locked into the bedchamber that Odysseus built with his own hands and few know of its existence. Yet Odysseus seriously fears that it has been moved and he is driven to a rare and intense anger at a moment of reunion when all should now be moving towards happy resolution. Perhaps he doubts his wife’s fidelity and the betrayal of the secret; even so, no ordinary man, especially those of the calibre of the worthless suitors (incapable even of stringing the bow) could have done what he dreads. Like a father who fears that his child is lost, his reaction on hearing that all is well is that anger which masks unspeakable fear. All becomes clear when it is accepted that only the Axis of the World can be both, or either, column and tree; and the Axis stands at the idealised omphalos-centre of the world. The tree-as-bed had a much earlier antecedent as the ‘Huluppu tree’ (“a solitary willow”) of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess, who just like Odysseus made a descent to the Underworld. Originally to be found growing wild on the banks of the Euphrates as a young tree at the dawn of the world, the mature Huluppu was taken by her brother Gilgamesh to the garden of the goddess after the south wind had torn it from the ground and flood waters (once again) had carried it along the primal stream. With the passing of the years the Huluppu tree grew stout, it became home to a thunderbird in its branches, a demon-maiden in its trunk, and a snake in its roots; so three beings defining the realms of air, middle ground and underworld confirmed the tree in its axial role as linear connection of Heaven and Earth. The tree ends its days as ‘a throne-bed’ crafted by Gilgamesh, who has been able to drive out the bird, the demon and the snake. Such motifs cry out for explication in terms of the Odyssean parallels, most particularly the tree which in time becomes a bed, but there is also the violence of its uprooting, and an associated flood or similar cosmic disaster. There is only one way that an axial replica such as this living wooden post made from the sacred tree of Athene could be uprooted from its firm grasp on the ground of the oikos. The narrative level is the foreground to a mystical sense which is so fearful that few would care to set it to words. The greatest anxiety known to man, even in those distant times before the age of scientific instrumentation, was whether the Earth would remain steady on its familiar axis. Would it tilt, leaving the patterns of day and night upon which all life is predicated, seriously out of kilter? This is no petty anxiety: the Precession of the Equinoxes was experienced and remembered, orally transmitted, universally, in the language of myth and legend (this being a major historical resource in the pre-literate age) long before Hipparchos made his so-called discovery of the phenomenon circa 125 BCE. His must have been a re-discovery, assisted by recorded observations, of a truth buried for many centuries in the dusty language of his ancestors until advances in literacy and mathematics finally enabled Greek astronomers to make sense of what they saw and the stories they already knew. Many readers may consider this a bold statement. It is however supported by the many recent scholarly researches which have unravelled the verifiable astronomical content of mythologies as distantly disposed as those of South American indigenous peoples, Egyptian pyramid builders, Scandinavian poets of the great northern sagas, and conceivably anywhere that held to the cult of a World Pillar axis. These cultures and many others uphold traditions of a great world-bearing Tree of Life which preserves the balance of the universe. That it should be upset is a universal cause of anxiety, whether it has been configured in cultural variations as diverse as totem poles, sacrificial horse posts, sacred anthills with a central timber, or kingpillars of the house. Odysseus’ fear that the secret of the omphalos chamber may have been revealed is entirely commensurate with early knowledge of the catastrophic consequences of Precession. If the World Pillar which sustains life through its connection with the universal guiding force of the gods is uprooted, there will be flood, fire and earthquake on cataclysmic levels; an Age will have come to an end just as the Golden Age of heroes in the time of Kronos was ended. At that happy time, before disaster struck (or so Hesiod relates in his Works and Days, 110-122) the land was fertile and no man suffered illness or bitter old age, but lived like a god, close to the gods and at peace. Hesiod does not tell us how this perfect age came to a close, but he is clear that Kronos was supplanted by Zeus and that there followed three more successive Ages displaying a steady deterioration from the ideal of the previous Golden Age. The Vedic tradition of India has preserved in greater detail the mathematical basis of such mythical Ages, and the Asian system is disturbingly accurate, in true scientific as opposed to mythic terms. Indirectly and in mythic language both Hesiod and Homer are referring to that wobble of the Earth’s geographic axis which disturbs the patterns in the sky responsible for the ‘right-ordering’ or ‘right-running’ of Earth. No wonder Odysseus is so angry with his wife: there is so much at stake. Has she revealed the secret? Perhaps in admitting the suitors to her household - or even to her bed - she has allowed the forces of disorder to take over and compromise the stability of the universe? Upon her fidelity, her strength and faithful preservation of the mystical bond with her husband (that is, her ‘remembering’ of all that is good, true, orderly and just) the fate of the cosmos depends. There was little doubt that she would remain true, but the combined forces of the suitors must in this analysis be viewed as inimical cosmic forces capable of undermining the symbol of Ithaka’s stability. The Greeks were well acquainted with the danger of changes in stellar pattern. Plato recorded in his Timaeus the very real terror provoked by the idea of loss of contact with familiar celestial bodies: those stars and “planetos” (wandering stars) which periodically disappear then reappear, causing fear and anxious conjecture among the people who fail to understand their variability, are a source of particular worry. Specific mention is made of the horrors of Precession in the speech of Critias, who has been informed of the “youth” and “ignorance” of the Greeks by an Egyptian priest. Part of the said “ignorance” is the Greek incomprehension of the myth of Phaethon’s fall, when the flaming chariot of the Sun burnt up things on the Earth. The truth is, says Critias, that there are variations in the course of the heavenly bodies, and these may lead to wholesale destruction by fire. Many deluges have occurred also, and wiped out many fine men and cities, he adds. So the disasters traditionally associated with Precession are evident here. In recent decades several mythographers have been guided by the inspired interpretations of De Santillana and von Dechend and other original research in anthropology to unravel many obscurities of myth and folklore. The results have revealed an astounding prevalence of precessional knowledge in all major cultures of the world. Jane Sellers (1992) has interpreted precessional symbolism in Egyptian art and literature; Thomas Worthen (1991) has defined and applied a paradigmatic schema to the analysis of precessional mythology in several cultures; and William Sullivan (1996) has found the same ideas at work among the ancient Inca community in South America. In every case, the fall of the axis (whether in the form of axle, column, mountain, pole or tree) is accompanied by the dawn of a New Age characterised by the overturning of the previous one, accompanied by flood, fire and loss of life. These mythologies are as old as the barely understood but definitely cosmic hymns of the Vedas. Those requiring a more radical proof of early knowledge of Precession will find it in the sexagesimal system still used in the present numbering of time and space, the sequence 60-120-180-360, which applies both to the hours of the day and the degrees of the circle, using base 60. These are equally the basis of the Hindu yugas or Great Ages and the metrical scheme of the Vedas, the Sumerian calendar and king lists, and many universal myths, all inspired by the just-visible annual precessional shift of 50 seconds in one year, one degree in 72 years, 30 degrees in 2,160 years (when the Sun will begin to rise at dawn in a neighbouring house of the Zodiac, to westwards of the previous house), 60 degrees in 4,320 years, 120 degrees in 8,640 years, 180 degrees in 12,960 years, and so on to 360 degrees in 25,920 years, when the Sun will finally have completed its full precessional cycle. The Sumerians were acquainted with the cycle, also known as the Great Year, even before they had mastered the art of writing. As a working hypothesis it is confidently suggested that the great olive tree of Odysseus’ island represents that axis mundi which has variant forms and replications, many of which we have discovered barely concealed within Homeric epic poetry. From all the assembled information it has become clear that wherever the sacred vertical marker is set up by man, or assumed to have been found by him, a connection with the gods is verified and acted upon as if it were a divine and cosmic axis. Ithaka’s secret axis-tree may even represent not some axial replica of the kind intended, say, to bring blessings on the house in the manner of a domestic hearth or altar, but the central Axis of the World; that being so, it would define the island of Ithaka as the marker of a crucial central point in the visible sky. Here is an interpretation having tremendous potential for understanding the course and purpose of the hero’s journey, and more, for this is the most powerful of the Odyssey’s various signs, its highlighted semata, and it cannot be overlooked that its presence is pivotal in creating a resounding climax to the resolution of the epic narrative. Returning to the Odyssey, we know the tree has its roots in Ithaka. If it can be determined precisely where the tree grows, it will give a placement for the island itself. A celestial placement which might leave the tree with downward-growing branches presents no problem, since Homer has already introduced us to the inverted fig tree, and its pan-Indo-European prototype (inverted or otherwise) has already generated many other examples of the vital line of communication flowing from above to below, and below to above, along the trunk of a fruitful tree rooted in the Underworld, or the navel of the sea, the counterpart to the starry centre of the Heavens. Whether it occurs as the Haoma tree of the Persians (“to the soul he is the way to heaven”), the Soma tree of Vedic India, the Akkadian Tree of Life, or the “dark pine of Eridu” whose roots penetrated the abyss of Hea, its “station” the centre of the Earth and its crown in Heaven’s vault, “crystal white,” the tree is one and the same. But as so often made apparent, the esoteric substance of the tree can be replicated in the human form; the same may be said for those servants of the gods who have the power of speech, such as one of the earliest recorded gods in the Greek pantheon, Hermes the psychopomp, and the other divinity who exemplifies the gods’ line of communication, mighty Atlas. Atlas and Hermes “Malignant” Atlas, whom we met early in the first book of the Odyssey as the one “who has discovered / all the depths of the sea, and himself sustains the towering / columns which bracket Earth and sky and hold them together” (1, 52-54) is revealed by P. R. Hardie (1983) to be the human personification of that axis-tree which ties northern heavens to a more southerly abyss. Little wonder therefore that in later tradition the mighty sustainer of the heavens begins to spin, just as the Earth turns around its pole, or that the god lends his name to a North African mountain, the latter yet another axis-form linking Earth to the skies. Meanwhile, Homer’s term for the well-fashioned, upright bedpost in the recognition scene is “erma” (23, 198); this brings us to the particular symbolism of Hermes as psychopomp. The bedposts where Hephaistos strung his invisible net to entrap the adulterous lovers Ares and Aphrodite (8, 276-281) are also so named (“ermisin”, 278). This is also the Greek name of the cairn or pile of stones commonly set up to mark a place of burial, and the custom of adding a stone to the heap which is still practised even today goes back to a mark of respect offered to the dead by travellers. Since stones, as well as pillars, were widely worshipped as deities (or the homes of deities) it is therefore unsurprising that erma shared a name with the god Hermes the psychopomp, and that a custom grew which established the anthropomorphic wayside ‘herm’ as a grave marker and boundary stone. Properly speaking, erma referred to either an ordinary stone or the upright pole or stone crowning the heap. Here is a collection of etymological clues to Hermes in an axial role, substituting for the original wooden upright but still associated with the journey to another world. His history is as ancient as the Linear B tablets. Moreover, the four-sided statuary ‘herm’ for which he is best known refers to the meeting of the six directions (four horizontal, two vertical) at the omphalic point where the post or statue is set in the earth, which also explains the placement of the herm at crossroads. The Odyssey has therefore introduced the reader to a god who, over time, has travelled effortlessly between three planes (air, Earth and sea, and underworld home of Kalypso) and acted in a cosmic role. This ancient messenger was after all the grandson of Atlas by Atlas’ daughter, Maia, so he belongs to high places (born on Mt. Kyllene) and gives his name to the Hill of Hermes (“ermaios lophos”) where Eumaios keeps watch above the city (16, 471). From this axial perspective, it is easier to understand how Hermes flies so effortlessly between the homes of Circe and Kalypso and why in broader contexts he should find a mythic partner in Hestia, who is not only the goddess of the hearth (a prime omphalos symbol) but also an exemplar of wisdom and strength, which are equally prime axial qualities. The Unstable Pivot This treatment of the Odyssey has taken us along some twisting highways through mythic recastings of events in the firmament. Finally, modern astronomy can come to our aid in fixing a place high above, where the tree can be anchored as a mythic abstraction, but not however without some complexity due to the shifting pattern of our skies. Had it not already been allocated to Scheria, a likely candidate for celestial Ithaka might been found in the North Pole Star which stands above our north terrestrial Pole (NTP), but skywatchers aware of Precession could not have failed to notice that the polar point does not remain permanently fixed to a particular star. (The Pole Star was once identified as Thuban in Draco, but is currently with Polaris and will remain so for millennia to come, though sliding successively into gamma Cephei and delta Cygni). In between shifting from star to star, the world’s axis (and its conceptual axis mundi) is without a home. It wanders through black space. During the Bronze Age years from 2200 BCE and later, into the fourteenth century CE, the pole did not arrive within 10 degrees of a visible star, which left the observer without an exact point of reference for the fixing of his bearings on land or sea and also robbed calendrical measurements of their required accuracy. Up until now it has been sufficient to relate celestial travel to the most readily identifiable paths in the sky, but finally the entry of precessional themes into the story forces us to turn our gaze away from the earthrooted, north-south terrestrial axis linked to a shifting North Pole Star and away, too, from the circle of constellations in the Zodiac which further define the Sun’s passage. There is a particular disadvantage in reliance on the Zodiacal houses as markers of solar transit, in that Precession involves the shifting of the equinoctial points which determine the ideal plane of the Earth, as well as the relocation of solstices marking the turn of the seasons. The latter will travel (unseen of course, as they have no material existence) across the sky, just like the stars which are visible. The only way for the early observer to calculate their position without instruments was to relate their progress to the passage of a neighbouring star or asterism, most preferably one that was easily recognisable for its brightness, for example, or for a memorable configuration. Yet since the relationship of a particular equinoctial point with a particular star will rupture approximately every seven hundred years, inevitably there will have been times when the equinox or solstice was without a home, as it will be again. Therefore we must consider another significant theoretical construct, the pole of the ecliptic (representing the centre around which the Sun rotates in orbit, the NCP, or north celestial pole) and the star or stars which identify the projection of this pole. Since Odysseus has most likely travelled the full circumference of the ecliptic, a homecoming which recognises the centre of that circle seems most appropriate. Another Centre of the Sky The Pole Star is adequate for rule of thumb measurement on the basis of its ready visibility and the helpful pointer of the stars of the Big Dipper, signalled by Homer as one of the stars useful to Odysseus. But the truly useful and reliable stars are the highly accurate stars of the Pleiades which mark out the major turning points of the solar year and have the added advantage of six very bright stars forming a smaller version of the more famous ‘Dipper’. And here at last, I believe, we have come to Odysseus’ own stellar islands. Any book dedicated entirely to the ancient and universal importance of the Pleiades would be hard-pressed to cover the multitude of myths associated with this apparently insignificant little asterism tucked into the shoulder of Taurus, the Great Bull, and shown clearly there on Mithraic monuments. A brief description must suffice here, beginning with the purely astronomical pattern that these stars trace across the sky. In the fifth century BCE on the co-ordinate of Athens, the Pleiades had their heliacal rising around the 17 - 19 May and their setting on November 6th. These dates in spring and autumn vary little and always mark the intermediate (‘quarter’) days between the equinoxes and the solstices, the latter already noted as difficult to determine. (Between 900 and 700 BCE at the 39° latitude of Smyrna, reputedly Homer’s birth city, the Pleiades were visible from dusk until dawn between September 1st. and November 2nd). Due to their passage across the skies on a path symmetrically opposite to the Sun, the Pleiades provide a priceless guide to the passage of time during the hours of darkness, being visible for up to fourteen hours at Homer’s latitude. Once a year these stars reach their culmination in November as they cross the meridian at midnight, when they will have gained their maximum altitude from the point of the observer’s horizon. Another part of their importance from the second millennium onwards was the fact that during this period the Sun rose at dawn in the sign of Taurus at the vernal equinox, the spring marker of life’s renewal, which would render the Pleiades in Taurus the visible confirmation of that new solar phase. Moreover, as the Sun set in the west during these Bronze Age centuries, the Pleiades would daily rise in the east, transit the heavens and sink in the west at daybreak, having marked the high point of the skies at an equal distance between the two. Here was a gift to skywatchers everywhere: an unshifting, central marker of the skies. Little wonder either that the southern passageway of the Great Pyramid at Giza, as well as the Parthenon in Athens are both aligned to the Pleiades, that in Arabic they are known as ‘The Asterism’ or ‘The Foundation Stone’, or that their brightest star which we know as Alkyone was also known as Amba, the Mother, thereby bringing the fertility concept into the equation. The cultural continuity of Pleiad observation, myth-making and recording has been traced to pre-Vedic times in Europe and Asia, and found equally among Maoris, the Aborigines of Australia, and Chinese, Mayan and Aztec peoples, in all of whose traditions some remarkably consistent major features are apparent, including the presence of seven stars even though only six can be seen: “Seven are they in the songs of men, albeit only six are visible to the eye”, reported Aratus, Greek astronomer of the third century BCE.18 Many stories have been invented to explain the ‘missing’ Pleiad, but the most likely truth is that this constellation was important enough to be assimilated numerically to the other two great heptads, the Great Bear and Orion, who has three stars in his belt and four others defining the corners of his giant figure. Be that as may, the Greeks exhibited an exceptional attachment to the number seven, in their designation of the Seven Wonders of the World for example, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the Seven Wise Men of a philosophical Pleiad (whose maxims were recorded over the door of Apollo’s temple). The great Achaian warrior Achilleus was reputedly the seventh son of his parents, according to Callimachus. Is it possible that ancient civilisations searching for a visible, stable centre of the heavens, a true, visible centre separate from the polar centre, found what they sought somewhere in the form of the humble cluster of the Pleiades? We have spoken earlier of the sky centre where a ‘nail’ fastened the pole, mountain or tree to the sky; the same point could present as a ‘hole’. Among the Yakut and other Altaic peoples in the Asian homeland of early shamanism there was a belief that in the centre of the constellation a hole in the vault of Heaven allowed an inrush of cold air from the far side. A similar idea was embroidered with greater sophistication in India, where the same centre in the Pleiades has been identified as Vishnunabhi (‘navel of Vishnu’), a place circumscribed by the Sun in its revolution and a hollow source of ‘the universal magnetism’; for, it has been claimed, when the Sun reaches its closest approximation to Vishnunabhi the increase of magnetic influence on Earth brings about striking changes in man’s universal consciousness. In South America, the same conjunction of Sun and Pleiades, but with the zenith as their meeting point in May, was recorded in stone at Chichén Itzá in the Mayan classic period with the construction of the pyramid of Kukulcan. At this justifiably famous site, the shadow of a rattlesnake with ‘Pleiades tail’ (the markings on its tzab, or solar-faced ‘rattle’ which points to the zenith) is seen sixty days before the equinox at the time of Sun-Zenith alignment, ‘snaking’ its way dramatically down the pyramid steps as if it were alive. In the year 2012 of our era this event will coincide with a solar eclipse when the Moon will enter this already overloaded conjunction. In the view of John Major Jenkins, the construction of Kukulcan was predictive from the very outset of events due to occur in 2012 and intended to mark in calendrical fashion the visible approach of a new World Age when, in or around this date, we enter the ‘Age of Aquarius’. Ithaka and the Pleiades The major features of Pleiades myth we shall take one at a time, whilst considering their relevance to the characters and situations found on Odysseus’ Ithaka. The first identifies the lead star of the Pleiades, Alkyone (or Alcyone) with a bird woman and goddess. The next concerns the pursuit of the Pleiades by the constellation of the hunter Orion. The last identifies the same stars with flood, death and disaster, to which is appended a Myth of Destruction and the end of an Age. But first it will be useful to see the role allocated to the Pleiades and their lead star in Greek tradition as it has been preserved to date.
The Asterism in Myth
It is commonly said that the Pleiades received their name from the Greek verb to sail, pleion, since their spring reappearance marked the beginning of safe navigation; however pleion as ‘plenty’ also appears in the mythology. Others have proposed a connection with birds, peleiadai, which are pigeons or doves. Goddesses are very often given an avian avatar of this kind. Homer makes a brief reference to the lead star Alkyone, a sea-bird, in the Iliad (9, 562) and Hesiod fills out the story in a poem ‘The Marriage of Ceyx’, but most of what we know derives from Apollodorus (1. 7. 4), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (11, 270-748), and scattered references in Plutarch’s Moralia, their mythic genealogy preserving a cosmogonic tradition in which the axis (‘Atlas’) conjoins with the sea (or ‘navel’ thereof) to generate seven ‘daughter’ stars marking the apex of the Heaven, which seems most appropriate in view of his axial role in uniting the undersea world with the high point of the sky. Electra, Maia, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Asterope, and Merope are their names. All are exceedingly bright, but Alcyone / Alkyone is brightest of them all and fittest to serve as first among many. She is, I believe, our Penelope.
The history of the Pleiades as seasonal markers is a great deal older than any surviving folklore or literature. They appear on a cave painting in the Palaeolithic Cave at Lascaux in France, painted on the shoulder of the Bull (‘Taurus’), and are equally apparent as a cluster on an ancient seal from Mohenjo-Daro in India,26 while the Indian Nakshatra system which uses lunar asterisms rather than Zodiac positions to register sky Figure XVI-18 movements had recognised the Pleiades as the junction star of the first Nakshatra from at least 1181 BCE, when they marked the vernal equinox. In India they are named Krittika and given a role as the seven wives of the seven male stars of the Big Dipper, the latter being rishis or great seers. The seventh star, the one hard to see, is married to Dhruva, the Pole Star, or governing rishi. This close relationship between Pleiades and the stars of the terrestrial pole underlines their importance and quasi-identity with polar qualities, such as the conceptual and mystic Centre as a creative impulse or central principle from which life evolves.27 Confirmation of this mystical aspect of the asterism can be found in the ancient records of animal sacrifice. The hide of a black bull (representing Taurus) would be used to cover the Mesopotamian sacred drum; and the bull himself should ideally, in the view of sacrificers, be marked on the forehead by the white mark of the Pleiades. Perhaps on account of the link between Pleiades and fertilising rainfall, the Indian horse of great and costly Vedic horse-sacrifice should also display the same sign. The priestly thinking on this issue may be that an inborn sign should mark the desired destination of the sacrificial animal, the particular divinities associated with that site, and a specific outcome. Whatever the case, it would seem likely that the Pleiades had some immense benefit to confer on those who sought out its favours; and since sacrifice is so often a ritual designed to promote fertility it may be that it is the Pleiades as ‘senders of rain’ which are being invoked. Numbering in fact at least several hundred, only six stars are readily visible to the naked eye. They are identified and their predominant pattern marked in figure XVI-18, in which the form of yet another small ‘dipper’ can be imagined. It is as seven young men or women that the group is most usually known throughout the world, while the dancer who leads her band through the skies is generally identified with the brightest and largest of the group, Alkyone. The legends attaching to her, being particularly rich and relevant to our case, deserve greater scrutiny. Alkyone Her name is charmingly linked with the halcyon bird, otherwise known as the kingfisher, and a puzzling connection with a love story. A poet of the seventh century BCE, Alcman, wrote “Would that I were the ceryl bird who flies over the sea with his halcyon mate”, referring to the story of the love of Ceyx, a sea bird, and his wife Alkyone, the halcyon, who incurred the anger of Zeus for their impiety in naming themselves ‘Zeus and Hera’. In his anger the great god had turned them into birds. Tradition has it that after Ceyx was drowned at sea, Alkyone / the halcyon built a nest on the waves during the winter solstice and laid her eggs there, wailing for her lost mate. (This has distinct overtones of the ‘floating island’ and may relate to the passage of the Pleiades across the sky). Aristotle provides the detail that the days of nest building are the seven days before the solstice and the seven days of egg-laying are those that follow; these are days when the winds sleep, to be known even now as the peaceful ‘halcyon days’ which give a brief respite from winter storms. When the halcyon-bird flies about the head of Jason and foretells the calming of the winds, this ‘bird goddess’ reveals a prophetic voice (ossa) commonly attributed to birds as oracular beings. Athene appears in just such a role when having counselled her favourite to stand firm (like a true Achaian warrior) and urged him on by example, she takes the form of a swallow and sits on the house beam of Odysseus’ palace to watch the progress of the battle (22, 224-240). Because of Alkyone’s embodiment as a bird, Gerald Gresseth has interpreted her as a symbol of the Sun which plunges steeply into the waters just like the kingfisher. She certainly has some cosmic significance through her association with the quarter days and the stilling of winds, but I think we can do even better for Alkyone by stressing her role as marker (with her sisters) of the highest point in the skies close to the Pole Star, but an even truer marker of centrality than this star of the shifting pole. By virtue of a connection with this mystical centre, the halcyon would surely have the right to superior knowledge; she may certainly ‘plunge’ in a straight line in axial manner along the line established by her Titanic father, Atlas; and one with such celestial gifts may certainly have power over the winds. Her nest-building, egg-laying activities which are such a puzzling feature of the legend reveal themselves as tokens of annual renewal relevant to the solstice turn of the year, so that when (after the death of the mate and her nest-building, using the dead wood of the old year) she lays her eggs, the moment signifies that ‘coming into being’ universally associated with the turn of the year and the approaching renewal of life as the Sun begins its return journey from the dark days of winter solstice. Ithaka / Alkyone as the brightest member of the Pleiades group is the solar-defined equivalent of polar Scheria, with its glorious queen Arete: the first marks the extremity of the solar axis of the Sun’s ecliptic and the second gives a home to the extremity of the Earth’s polar axis, at the Pole Star. Alkyone / Penelope This novel twinning of the wife of Odysseus with a distant star demands a detailed exploration of points of similarity between the Alkyone of myth and the narrative heroine. Upon such concordances or contra-indications depends much of the case for identifying Ithaka in the Ionian group of Greek islands with the starry cluster of the Pleiades. To name the simplest first, both are female and mothers, and both, more potently, bewail the loss of a husband. Penelope is surrounded by her maids (and perhaps even her geese?) as surely as Alkyone enjoys the company of the other Pleiades; and Alkyone is the ‘hen’ to innumerable ‘chickens’, in the widespread name for the Pleiades in folklore. Both women are named for birds or have a bird-like role as the voice of truth and order. In Penelope’s case, she is the guardian of the olive tree column where her bed is literally incorporated into the fabric as a ‘nest in a tree’. In the absence of her husband she is responsible for its preservation and the stability of her household, which we have argued is ultimately the stability of the universal World Column. Her weaving and unweaving of the shroud of Laertes may be a metaphor for the waxing and waning phases of the Moon, and if so, the identification of Alkyone with the first lady of the Pleiades would be highly appropriate, for at a certain point the passage of the Moon through the box-like formation of this stellar group is capable of temporarily obscuring the four main stars from view. Even more convincing are the reiterated appearances of Penelope (penelops, the water bird?) as she descends the stairs of the palace. Key words in her four separate appearances are ‘radiance’ and the ‘shining’ quality of her veil, which point to stellar light. Here is a perfect match between the bright veil which habitually covers the head of Penelope and the cloud nebula which frequently obscures the star Alkyone. Even more powerful is Penelope’s association with columns other than the olive tree rooted in her chamber, that is, the cosmic-axis pillars of the domos, where like Arete she occupies the privileged position of the mistress of the house. This identification (achieved symbolically through an ‘approximation’ having much in common with the merger of divine beings with the leafy form of a tree) echoes not only Arete on Scheria but other pillar guardians such as Kalypso (another daughter of Atlas) and Hektor in his capacity of guardian of Troy, named by Pindar as its “pillar of strength”. The World Pillar of mythic geography connects the Earth to Heaven’s centre, and it is the Pleiades which mark that true central point half way through their transit of the night sky. There are even more indications that Homer’s characterisation of Penelope was guided by the facts and mythic fiction attaching to the Pleiades. Of Mountains, Rain, Tears and Thrones The enormous capacity for weeping shown by the lady of Ithaka should be taken very seriously. The death-dealing Queen of the Laistrygonians was “as big as a mountain peak” (10, 112f.) but Penelope provides the benevolent, oppositional equivalent when her tears are compared with the melting snows which run off the mountains (she listens, she weeps, her body melts, 19, 204) with the difference that the melt waters from the hills are those that create fertility on Earth. Moreover, tear-shedding in the ancient world has been identified as a ritual act associated with “reinvigorating the Earth” or “reviving the dead” a useful insight helpful in understanding not only the innate sense of Penelope’s inordinate weeping but also her embodiment as Alkyone or the Pleiades in general, for the autumnal appearance of this constellation marks the onset of the rainy season in the northern hemisphere, bringing with it the certainty of fruitful late summer harvest. Both their winter solstice appearance overhead at night fall and their conjunction with the Sun at the spring equinox (in 2,000 BCE) reinforce the ancient link between Pleiades and life renewal, the latter readily accommodated to the spiritual rebirth of man. All that we read of Pleiad traditions and astronomical facts confirms their role as markers of the true centre of the sky, the place where the axis of the ecliptic may leap from its socket and fall, to unleash the full and terrifying powers of the cosmos. Those with an interest in more recent folklore may be intrigued by the claims of Johann Heinrich Mädler (var. Maedler), once a celebrated astronomer and director at the observatory in Dorpat, Estonia, who published in 1846 his theory of the ‘Central Sun’, since disputed in these better-informed decades and no longer current. His view (as a man of science) was that the Pleiades are the central group of the entire system of the Milky Way, and Alkyone the individual star most likely to be the true ‘central sun’.35 He proposed Alkyone as the companion star to our Sun in a binary system, hence, another Sun. The value of his observation to this present enquiry is that even with the aid of telescopes the Pleiades seem to maintain their place at the centre of the sky, a fact which may have induced those early Jehovah’s Witnesses happy to adopt the science of Mädler to identify the lead star Alkyone as the ‘Throne of God’. ‘Low and Away’ Returning to the lines of the Odyssey which set the previous chapter on its way to finding the home of Penelope and Odysseus, we are now in a better position to weigh up the directional indicators. The Pleiades, it has been said, are highly important to agriculture and travel because they are such accurate and unvarying markers of the season. So here is an answer to Athene’s suggestion that “there are indeed many who know it”. The Pleiades are visible from the whole of the northern hemisphere, which they transit from east to west at night, and this fact fully accords with the Odyssey’s description of Ithaka as lying towards “the dark” or “mist and darkness” (west, or celestial north, “up and away”) as well as its opposition, “the east and sunshine” or “east and sunrise”. East and west extremes, a high position at the zenith and low position as they fall below the horizon are all staging posts on the trajectory of this group. Once again, threedimensional celestial geography is providing an answer to Homer’s puzzling topography. So, what of Ithaka as “low and away, last of all upon the water”? The asterism is seen as we have said from March to April, climbing the night skies from the east and reaching the zenith, then descending and sinking from view on the western horizon. The Pleiades are “last of all”, on the ‘cosmic water’ when they stand at the heavens’ high point, but equally so immediately before their first appearance in the east and later, falling away in the west at night, “toward the dark”. Any observer still believing that the Sun travelled around the Earth would assume that like the Sun, the Pleiades passed under or behind the Earth to reappear in the east, at night, just as the Sun reappears by day. Finally, with such a long term of visibility and such an important role as marker stars, the Pleiades could not help but be as well known as Athene claims. The Steadfast Column One last observation: Odysseus feared that the axis-tree may have shifted in his absence, but it did not. It was Scheria that suffered the petrifaction of its flying ship which created a ‘neighbouring island’ and Scheria as Pole Star which should, and quite rightly did in all astronomical accuracy, experience dislocation from its axis. The Phaiakians may be thought poised to undertake yet another re-colonisation following the immobilisation of their ship. The Pleiades, on the other hand, do not deviate from their path. They mark the centre of the skies for every observer in the northern hemisphere for the greater part of the year and, even more, measure the seasons by which man is able to keep his activities in tune with the great cosmic dance of the stars. Nevertheless it is reasonable in human terms that Odysseus should fear the same dislocation on his home island as that suffered by the North Pole Star. Emboldened by these possibilities, we might risk finding a stellar territory for Odysseus himself.
![[PS4] Filthymick420](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/201/201444.jpg?1555738739){kind=avatar}
