By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 5, 2026
What the Pleiades Are, in Sky and in Story
The Pleiades are a tight knot of bright young stars in the constellation Taurus, visible to the naked eye in the autumn and winter skies of the Northern Hemisphere. In myth, they are most famously the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione, transformed into stars to escape the hunter Orion. The same cluster carries names and stories in nearly every culture that watched the sky.
Few asterisms have been adopted by so many separate peoples and put to so many separate uses. The Greeks read the Pleiades as a calendar for plowing and a memorial for grief. The Aztecs timed a ceremony of cosmic renewal to their passage overhead. The Maori still mark their new year by the cluster’s first dawn rising. The Hebrew Bible names them in the same breath as Orion. A cluster of seven stars has, in other words, organized rituals, harvests, navigation, and stories of pursuit and loss across an enormous range of human history.
This article walks the Pleiades through their best-attested myths and their best-attested civic uses, and shows how the persistence of a “seven sisters” pattern, often with one sister missing, ties the stardoms together within the broader landscape of mystical and occult practices.
The Greek Story: Daughters of Atlas
In the Greek tradition, the Pleiades are seven sisters: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Their father, Atlas, holds up the sky as punishment for siding with the Titans against Zeus. Their mother, Pleione, is an Oceanid nymph. Several sisters became consorts to the major Olympian gods. Maia, the eldest, bore Hermes by Zeus. Electra bore Dardanus, the founding father of Troy. Taygete bore Lacedaemon, the legendary founder of Sparta. The genealogy mattered to ancient readers because it tied the cluster to the bloodlines of cities they actually lived in.
Orion’s Pursuit and the Catasterism
The most-told version of how the sisters became stars involves the giant hunter Orion. After encountering the Pleiades and their mother in Boeotia, Orion is said to have pursued them across the earth for seven years. The sisters cried out for relief, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Zeus first changed them into doves and then placed them in the sky, where Orion still chases them across the heavens, according to the version preserved in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the Pleiades. The pursuit motif, sisters fleeing a hunter into the sky, recurs with striking consistency in unrelated traditions on other continents.
Hesiod and the Working Year
The earliest substantial Greek text on the Pleiades is not a hymn but a farmer’s almanac. In Works and Days, written around 700 BCE, Hesiod tells his brother Perses to begin the harvest when the Pleiades rise at dawn in May, and to start plowing when they set in November [1]. The cluster is, in his hands, a working tool. The mythic story of seven women fleeing a hunter sits beside a perfectly practical line of advice about wheat. Hesiod treats both as part of the same ordered world, and Greek readers seem to have done the same.
The Lost Pleiad
A keen viewer in good conditions sees six bright stars in the cluster, sometimes a faint seventh. Many ancient cultures counted seven, then told a story to account for the missing one. In Greek myth, the lost sister is most often Merope, who married the mortal Sisyphus and dimmed in shame, or Electra, who hid her face in mourning after the fall of Troy founded by her son Dardanus. The “lost Pleiad” trope is so widespread that the astronomer Robert Burnham Jr. catalogued it across European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American, and Aboriginal Australian traditions [2].
An Astronomical Footnote on a Mythic Pattern
There is a tantalizing astronomical reading of why so many cultures, separated by oceans, tell the same story of seven sisters with one missing. The two stars now closest together in the cluster, Atlas and Pleione, were further apart in the deep past. Modeling their proper motion, astronomers have suggested that around 100,000 years ago Pleione would have been clearly resolvable as a separate star, making the cluster naturally appear as seven distinct points to the naked eye [3]. If that reading holds, the “seven sisters” stories may carry an oral memory older than agriculture, older than the wheel, older than writing. The claim is debated, and a careful reader holds it as a hypothesis, not a proof. It still reframes what the missing seventh sister might mean.
The Calendar in the Sky
Across cultures, the Pleiades worked as a clock. Their disappearance into the dawn glow and their return as a pre-dawn riser came at predictable times of year, and people built calendars around those moments. The same cluster timed harvests in Greece, marked the new year in Aotearoa, anchored cosmic renewal in central Mexico, and may even appear on the oldest surviving picture of the night sky.
The Aztec Tianquiztli and the New Fire Ceremony
The Aztecs called the Pleiades Tianquiztli, “the gathering place.” Every fifty-two years, when the 365-day solar count and the 260-day ritual count realigned, the empire performed the New Fire Ceremony to keep the world from ending. According to the World History Encyclopedia, all hearth fires were extinguished, and priests waited on the Hill of the Star outside Tenochtitlan for the Pleiades to reach the zenith at midnight [4]. When they did, a new fire was kindled on the chest of a sacrificial victim, and runners carried it to relight every household in the city. The ceremony was not symbolic. It was, for those who performed it, the literal reason the sun rose the next morning.
The Nebra Sky Disk
Around 1600 BCE in central Europe, someone hammered out a bronze disk roughly thirty-two centimeters across and inlaid it with gold figures showing a sun or full moon, a crescent moon, and a tight cluster of seven stars. The Nebra Sky Disk, recovered by metal-detectorists in 1999 in Saxony-Anhalt and authenticated by long forensic study, is the oldest known concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena. The seven-star cluster is read by most archaeoastronomers as the Pleiades, and the disk’s geometry has been interpreted as a rule for inserting a leap month when the crescent moon appeared next to the cluster on the right day. A Bronze Age farming community was, in other words, using the same cluster Hesiod would later use, for the same purpose, a thousand years before Hesiod was born.
The Hebrew Kimah
The Hebrew Bible names the Pleiades three times, under the word Kimah, “the cluster.” Job 9:9 and 38:31 invoke the cluster as evidence of God’s incomprehensible power: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” Amos 5:8 places it alongside Orion as a sign of divine governance over the seasons. The biblical writers expected their audience to know which stars they meant. The cluster was, even there, common knowledge.
The Seven Sisters Across Cultures
The Greek myth is one local form of a far larger pattern. A handful of other traditions, with deep documentation, show how widely the Pleiades have anchored sacred and civic life.
Aboriginal Australian Songlines
In many Aboriginal Australian traditions, the Pleiades are a group of young women, often pursued by a man identified with stars in nearby Orion. The pattern is so close to the Greek version that it has prompted serious comparative work. The version recorded among Aboriginal communities in central Australia is bound to specific songlines and ceremonies, including the women’s traveling songlines of the Seven Sisters Dreaming, which trace a path across the continent. As a 2020 essay in The Conversation by astronomer Ray Norris and colleagues notes, the cluster’s first dawn rising marks the start of winter for several Aboriginal groups [3].
The Hindu Krittika
In the Vedic tradition, the Pleiades are the Krittika, often translated as “the cutters.” They are the foster mothers of Kartikeya, the warrior god born from sparks of Shiva. Six of the seven Krittika nursed the infant, and to suckle them all at once Kartikeya grew six faces, earning the name Shanmukha, “six-faced.” The seventh wife, Arundhati, stayed with her sage husband Vasistha and is identified with a star in the constellation we call Ursa Major. The Krittika is the third nakshatra in the Vedic lunar zodiac and remains active in Hindu ritual practice.
Subaru and Japan
In Japan, the cluster appears in the eighth-century Kojiki as Mutsuraboshi, “six stars.” Its modern name, Subaru, comes from a verb meaning “to gather” or “to unite.” The automotive company chose Subaru as its brand name in 1953 to mark the merger of five firms into one, and the six visible stars of the cluster appear on its logo. The smallest star on the logo represents the parent company, the larger five stars the merging subsidiaries.
Maori Matariki
The Maori name for the cluster, Matariki, contracts mata-ariki, “eyes of the chief,” or mata-Riki, “eyes of the god.” Its first pre-dawn rising in late June or early July marks the Maori new year. The same rising guided Polynesian voyagers across the open Pacific, alongside other pointer stars, and the festival around it has been revived as a public-facing celebration of remembrance, gathering, and forward planning. New Zealand recognized Matariki as an official public holiday for the first time on 24 June 2022 [5].
Indigenous North American Sky-Knowledge
Lakota oral tradition holds that the people came from the Pleiades and will return to them, a teaching anchored in specific star-stories and the geography of the Black Hills. Among the Blackfoot, the cosmic setting of the cluster signaled the moment to move toward a hunting ground. The Cherokee tell of seven boys who danced into the sky, a story preserved in late nineteenth-century ethnographic collection. The motif of children, often seven, becoming stars to escape danger or scolding, is striking and appears, with regional variations, across much of native North America.
What the Cluster Actually Is
The cluster catalogued by Charles Messier in 1771 as M45 is, in modern terms, an open cluster of more than a thousand gravitationally bound stars roughly 444 light-years from Earth. Its bright members, including Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and Pleione, are hot blue-white B-type stars. The cluster is young by astronomical standards, with an estimated age of about 100 million years, which puts its formation roughly thirty million years after the death of the dinosaurs. The bluish glow visible in long-exposure photographs is not residual gas from the cluster’s birth but unrelated interstellar dust the cluster is currently passing through, lit by its hot stars.
Most observers see six naked-eye stars under a dark sky. Trained or sharp-eyed viewers see seven, occasionally eight or nine. Pleione is variable and unreliable. The visual ambiguity at the edge of vision is, in part, why nearly every culture that watched the cluster also told a story about how many stars there used to be.
Why the Pleiades Persist
A cluster that organized planting, navigation, ritual, and grief for several thousand years does not quietly retire. The Subaru badge is one obvious survival. Matariki has grown into a national holiday with parades, fireworks, and televised dawn ceremonies. Astrologers continue to read the cluster’s transits. Astronomers track the stellar dynamics of an unusually photogenic open cluster. Storytellers keep finding the seven-sisters frame useful: Lucinda Riley’s bestselling Seven Sisters novel sequence, named for the Pleiades, has sold tens of millions of copies since 2014.
The Pleiades persist because they read so easily as a group. The Greek mind saw seven sisters in a row. The Aztec mind saw a marketplace overhead. The Maori mind saw the eyes of a chief. The Vedic mind saw six wet-nurses around a divine infant. The cluster invites a story about company. It also, by losing one of its members at the threshold of vision, invites a story about loss. Few celestial objects offer both possibilities so cleanly. That, more than any single myth, may be why the seven sisters keep returning to the human imagination, archive after archive, century after century.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the Pleiades called the Seven Sisters?
The name comes from Greek myth, in which the cluster represents seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione. Their names are Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Many other cultures, including Aboriginal Australian, Lakota, and Cherokee, also count the cluster as seven young women or seven children.
Are there really only six visible stars in the Pleiades?
Most observers under dark skies see six bright stars. Sharp-eyed viewers see seven or more. The cluster contains over a thousand stars in total, but only its brightest hot blue-white members are naked-eye visible. The variability of the seventh star, often associated with Pleione or Merope, has likely fed the worldwide “lost Pleiad” stories.
What does the Pleiades myth have to do with the Aztec calendar?
The Aztecs called the cluster Tianquiztli, “the gathering place,” and watched its midnight zenith every fifty-two years to confirm that the world would continue. The New Fire Ceremony, held when the calendar round of 365-day and 260-day counts realigned, was timed to that observation and renewed every hearth fire in the city.
How does the Maori festival of Matariki relate to the Pleiades?
Matariki is the Maori name for the cluster. Its first pre-dawn rising in late June or early July marks the Maori new year. The festival of Matariki includes remembrance of the dead from the past year, gratitude for the harvest, and forward planning. New Zealand made Matariki a national public holiday in 2022.
What is the lost Pleiad?
“The lost Pleiad” names the seventh, dim or invisible star that stories explain in many traditions. In Greek myth she is most often Merope, who married a mortal and hid in shame, or Electra, who turned away after the fall of Troy. Astronomers have suggested that the cluster looked clearly seven-starred about 100,000 years ago, when Pleione and Atlas were further apart, which may underlie the worldwide pattern.
Why does the Subaru car brand use a Pleiades logo?
“Subaru” is one Japanese name for the cluster, derived from a verb meaning “to gather” or “to unite.” The car company adopted the name in 1953 to mark the merger of five separate firms into one, and the six visible stars of the cluster appear on its logo. The smallest represents the parent company, and the five larger represent the merging subsidiaries.
How old is the oldest known image of the Pleiades?
The Nebra Sky Disk, a bronze disk dating to roughly 1600 BCE found in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, is widely considered the oldest concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena. Its tight cluster of seven golden stars is most often interpreted as the Pleiades. If the reading is correct, the disk records the cluster’s role in a Bronze Age lunisolar calendar.
Are the Pleiades mentioned in the Bible?
Yes. The Hebrew Bible names them under the word Kimah, “the cluster,” in Job 9:9, Job 38:31, and Amos 5:8, usually paired with Orion. In Job, the cluster is invoked as evidence of God’s power over the heavens. In Amos, it appears as a sign of divine governance over the agricultural seasons.
What are the Pleiades in Hindu mythology?
In the Vedic tradition, the cluster is called the Krittika and is identified with the six foster mothers of the warrior god Kartikeya, son of Shiva. The seventh sister, Arundhati, remained with her husband Vasistha and is identified with a different star, in Ursa Major. Krittika is also the third nakshatra of the Vedic lunar zodiac.
