Seven Sisters

fragment 168 B, Sappho, 630-570 BCE

Hawaiian Calendar, MUL.APIN Babylonian Tablet (ca. 1000 BCE), Nebra Sky Disc (ca. 1800-1600 BCE)

When the rising in the east,
falls in sync with the setting in the west,
The year begins

When in spring with which the year begins,
A new light sickle stands near the Pleiades.
If the moon only stands on the third day of this month,
already a swollen crescent, then in this year, add a month

the circle is a sun
the circle is a moon

Works and Days (700 BCE), Hesiod

When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, are rising, begin your harvest,
When they are set, begin your ploughing.
They are hidden and appear again as the year moves round,
when first you sharpen your sickle

Alexis Wright, Margo Neale, Greek Myth

Orion, the hunter of women
Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Taygete, Asterope, Celaeno, Merope
Pursued, transformed into a flock of doves, set in the heavens

Seven sisters. Linked to the night sky, to the land.
Running from danger, clustered together,
To show us how to conquer adversity
Songlines, archives held in Country
a way of retaining, transmitting knowledge
Archived or held in the land.
Corridors or pathways of knowledge

Sidereus Nuncius (1610, Venice), Galileo Galilei

These sisters … A cloud of kin … A cluster dispersing …
What was observed … is the nature or matter of the Milky Way,
observed so well that all disputes are destroyed by visible certainty,
a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in clusters. 
that milky luster, dispersed through the ether
if you direct a glass, you will meet with a dense crowd of stars

These sisters, our kin   Born of the sea   Born of gas and dust
These nebulous swarms, Near lie more than forty other invisible stars
each escapes our sight, its smallness, its great distance from us,
from the commingling of their rays arises a certain brightness

fragment 168 B, Sappho, 630-570 BCE

Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες
The moon and the Pleiades have set,