A curious idea which is attested across all continents is that of a “lost Pleiad”, in which one of the stars in the Pleiades cluster– generally called sisters, virgins, maidens, and so one — fades, either from death, abduction, or even shame. Often, they are menaced by men identified with the constellation Orion.1 The astronomer Keith P. Hertzog writes,
A drop in the hierarchical progression of Pleiades luminosities ensures that most people will report six, keen eyed, tenacious observers nine or ten, but almost nobody would stress seven. Yet this has not always been the case. The combined testimony of numerous societies, spanning continents and millennia, for a seventh easily visible Pleiad which subsequently dimmed, is explainable either by an unknown type of cyclical variation, or by cultural diffusion on a scope utterly unprecedented in human annals.2
This unprecedented cultural diffusion would have began 100,000 years ago, when Europeans and Indigenous Australians last shared a common ancestor.3 This proposal is interesting, and reminds me of a myth transmitted by Klamath people which accords, quite surprisingly, with the eruption of Mount Mazama about 7,000 years BP.4 (Outside of this event, geomythology is generally hogwash — the very definition of confirmation bias. See Witton & Hing.5)
If indeed there is an ancient seed at the root of this mytheme, it illustrates longevity of particular cultural complexes. The great semiotician Thomas Sebeok, observing that ritual (incl. religion) seems to be the best form of preserving cultural memory, proposed forming an “atomic priesthood” to deter future humans, perhaps thousands of years in the future, from disturbing nuclear waste sites.6 In other words, myth and ceremony have the unique ability to attest changes in deep time, or at least close to it.
This is particularly notable for astrology-astronomy, as the Pleiades example suggests. Though humans have generally relied on the consistency of the firmament for navigation, time-keeping, and of course divination, it is not only precessing from our vantage point on Earth, but also shifting in real space as well. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the constellations will mutate.
Indeed it is for this reason why constellations no longer accord with their respective zodiacal signs, which are somewhat arbitrary divisions of the ecliptic (despite rumors that there is now a 13th zodiac sign.) It did, however, accord with what ancient Babylonians saw thousands of years ago.
If astrology (and its junior sibling geomancy) survive another several thousand years — or humanity leaves Earth like some clamor for — their actual practice is unlikely to change. We will still use a system predicated on extinct constellations, perhaps from the perspective of an extinct planet. I call this hypothetical state ghost astrology, in which rituals and mythologies have delaminated from celestial events; the stars and constellations themselves long transformed by inhuman processes. In the absence of their original referent they become specters, the trace of an ancient configuration. I prefer this over fossil astrology as the word “ghost” highlights the active and agential nature of planetary and zodiacal intelligences in Western esotericism: a revenant is always doomed to return.
This concept has practically no academic or scholarly application as it stands. It does suggest to me an artistic practice, however: what technologies, rituals, and mythologies might appear as speculative astrologies? Astrologies for other planets, real or imagined? Astrologies for distant pasts, astrologies for far-flung futures? Astrologies populated entirely by shadow planets like Rahu and Ketu? Though this might be applicable to a worldbuilding project of some sort, I’m definitely more interested in speculative art beyond genre fiction, television, and video games.
Footnotes
- Norris, R. P., & Norris, B. R. (2021). Why are there seven sisters? Advancing cultural astronomy: studies in honour of Clive Ruggles, 223-235. ↩︎
- Hertzog, K. P. (1987). Ancient stellar anomalies. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 28(1), 27-29. Chicago. I have excised the parentheticals which provided technical definitions. ↩︎
- Norrs & Norris 2021, p. 233 ↩︎
- Vitaliano, D.B. Geomythology: geological origins of myths and legends. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273, 1-7. ↩︎
- Witton, M. P., & Hing, R. A. (2024). Did the horned dinosaur Protoceratops inspire the griffin? Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 49(3-4), 363-388. Chicago.
↩︎ - Sebeok, T. A. (1984). Die Büchse der Pandora und ihre Sicherung: ein Relaissystem in der Obhut einer Atompriesterschaft. Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 6(3), 229-251. ↩︎
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