Toner_Low

QUESTIONS WRITTEN IN THE STARS

What do people need to know about the Pleiades? The star cluster, properly known as Messier 45, contains hundreds of stars, though only six of these are visible to the naked eye. Yet throughout the cluster’s extensive lore, it is held to have seven stars. There is now a theory, one supported by Hindu and Mongolian myths, that in the second millennium BC a seventh visible star in the cluster went extinct. In the Rosh Hashanah treatise of the Talmud, the reason for the star disappearing was God’s wrath; by taking the star away, He caused a shakeup in the celestial clockwork of the universe which produced the Deluge. In Celtic festival of Samhain, connected with mourning, the Pleiades reach their zenith in the night sky. Was the disappearance of a star such a momentous event that, millenia later, we still live in a world partially shaped by our ancestors' interpretations of it? Is the Pleiades cluster, and that ill-fated seventh star of legend, the reason why ancient Hebrews latched onto the number seven as a divine numeral? Opinions, please.