Colinxy: Man’s Oldest Story

If humanity has a single shared story — a myth so ancient it predates nations, languages, and even our migration out of Africa — it is the story of the Pleiades. No other tale appears so consistently across cultures, continents, and epochs. While the details vary, the core narrative is astonishingly stable: a cluster of seven stars, often described as seven sisters, seven maidens, or seven beings, with the persistent puzzle that only six are visible to the naked eye.

This is not a coincidence. It is memory, a memory older than civilisation itself.

The Greek Version: Seven Sisters, Six Seen

In Greek mythology, the Pleiades are the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Yet to the human eye, only six stars shine clearly. The Greeks noticed this. They explained it by saying Merope dimmed her light out of shame for marrying a mortal.

But the Greeks were not alone in noticing the missing star. Cultures separated by oceans and millennia tell the same story.

The Astronomical Explanation

Modern astronomy provides the key: Around 100,000 years ago, the seventh star was visible.

The Pleiades are a young, dynamic cluster. Over tens of thousands of years, their positions shifted. One star — the “lost” or “hidden” sister — has gradually dimmed or drifted such that it is no longer easily visible to the naked eye.

This means:

• The story of seven stars predates the dimming.
• The story of one missing predates our dispersal across the globe.
• The myth is at least 100,000 years old — older than agriculture, writing, or settled civilisation.

It is, quite literally, the oldest provable story humanity possesses.

Bronze Age Echoes

The Pleiades appear on Bronze Age artefacts across Europe — carved into stones, etched into pottery, and represented on the famous Nebra Sky Disk. These depictions confirm that the cluster held deep symbolic meaning long before classical mythology.

But the story is not confined to Europe.

Global Names, Shared Memory

Nearly every culture has a name for the Pleiades:

• Japan: Subaru (yes, the car logo)
• Australia: Aboriginal groups speak of the Seven Sisters chased by Orion
• Native Americans: The Kiowa, Cherokee, and Lakota all tell versions of the Seven Maidens
• India: Krittika, the mothers of the war god Kartikeya
• China: Mao, the Hairy Head, part of the lunar mansions
• Polynesia: Mataliki, Makali‘i, or Matariki, depending on region

The details differ, but the structure remains: seven beings, one lost, one hidden, one fallen, one ashamed, one stolen, one dimmed.

This is not cultural diffusion. It is shared prehistory.

And Yes — Māori Had Their Version

In Nui Tireni, the Pleiades are known as Matariki. But here is where modern politics intrudes on ancient astronomy. The Ardern–Hipkins government declared Matariki to be the Māori New Year, as though all iwi shared a single, uniform cosmology.

They did not.

Different iwi had different names, different stories, and different calendrical traditions. Some used Puanga (Rigel) rather than Matariki to mark the new year. Some did not treat Matariki as a new year marker at all.

But with a stroke of a pen, the government standardised Māori mythology into a single State-approved narrative — a kind of cultural flattening masquerading as celebration.

It will be interesting to see whether iwi who historically followed Puanga or other traditions continue to do so in the decades ahead, or whether the gravitational pull of State-endorsed mythology will erase those differences.

Why This Story Matters

The Pleiades myth is not just a story. It is a fossil of human memory — a narrative so ancient that it survived the Ice Age, the migrations out of Africa, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the divergence of languages.

It is the closest thing we have to a universal human myth.

And it reminds us of something profound:

Before we were Greeks or Māori, Europeans or Polynesians, Christians or pagans, we were simply humans, looking up at the same sky, telling the same story about the same stars.

A story older than writing. Older than farming. Older than nations. Older than mythologies themselves.

A story that still shines — even if one of its stars no longer does.

Colinxy regularly blogs at No Minister. This article was sourced HERE