Flossie’s Tales

I am currently trying to research the legends behind the Pleiades, the seven sisters.

In my mind’s eye I can see the bookshelf with all my relevant books on it. It is several hundred miles away. I am particularly interested in the Japanese legend, as, so I have been told, the logo of the car maker Subaru depicts six stars in the configuration of the star cluster. I was led to believe that Subaru derived from the legend of the six wise men -  the six brightest stars.

So-I-have-been-told and led-to-believe are not good enough, so I hit Google.

Subaru - 83,600,000: Obviously and not at all usefully.

Subaru legend - 4,320,000: Still car based.

Subaru star legend - 163,000: The second hit is ‘Astronomy in Japan’ a useful resource, but still not pinning it down with enough detail. The rest are all about cars.

I know what will knock out the vehicle manufacturers monopoly:

Subaru astronomy - 140,000: Sadly, there is a large telescope called Subaru. It has made lots of discoveries. Discoveries that have themselves become Google hits. Damn.
One of the more likely hits claims the cluster is called Mutsuraboshi (sound familiar?). More damn.

If you can’t beat them, join them:

Subaru car name meaning - 1,150,000: Fourth hit: Bingo.
In the West the cluster is called Pleiades, in China, Mao, and in Japan, Subaru (”to govern” or gather together”). In Japan, it also goes by the name Mutsuraboshi (”Six Stars”), under which title it appears frequently in very old Japanese documents such as Kojiki and Manyosyu and literature such as Makura-no-soshi. Clearly, this is one of the clusters much loved by the Japanese from ancient times. Interestingly enough, FHI was created by the merger of six companies, so you can see what a truly evocative name Subaru is.

I even managed to find three sources (although how independent anything is these days is debatable).

What the internet search engine taketh away, it giveth back. Faster, it seems, than it would have taken me to pick a book off a shelf and find the relevant chapter.

This entry was posted Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Today. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.