Primitive Traditions as to the Pleiades

Abstract

MR. JUSTICE HALIBURTON'S letter of December 1 (vol. xxv. p. 100) will have been read by many as calling attention to a curious subject. As it refers especially to me, and indeed arises out of my remark on the story of the “Lost Pleiad” in Dawson's “Australian Aborigines” (NATURE, vol. xxiv. p. 530), I now write a few lines in reply. But it will not be possible to discuss properly Mr. Haliburton's ideas as to the Pleiades till he publishes them in full, with the evidence on which he grounds them. It must not be supposed that the subject has been unnoticed till now by anthropologists. That the Pleiades are an important constellation, by which seasons and years are regulated among tribes in distant parts of the world, that they are sometimes worshipped, and often festivals are held in connection with their rising, that their peculiar grouping has suggested such names as the “dancers,” or “hen and chickens,” and that numbers of myths have been made about them—all this has long been on record, though in a scattered way, and at any rate it is well known to students. Mr. Haliburton's letter shows that he has new information to add to the previous stock, and furthermore that he has formed a theory that the Pleiad beliefs go back to a marvellously remote period in the history of man, when these stars were, as he says, the “central sun” of the religions, calendars, myths, traditions, and symbolism of early ages. If the astronomical evidence is to support so vast a structure as this, it need hardly be said that it must go far beyond what Mr. Haliburton mentions in his letter. But when his contemplated book is published, he may be sure of his facts being appreciated and his theories fairly dealt with. Though, as I have just said, this cannot be done here, I may be allowed one suggestion. Mr. Haliburton is good enough to speak of me as being a cautious person. May I in that capacity express a hope that verbal coincidences, when not close enough really to prove connection, may be kept out of an argument which ought to go on a more solid footing. Why should the name of the star Alkyone have anything to do with the name of Alkinoos, king of Corfu? They look indeed rather more alike in Mr. Haliburton's letter, where the latter name is misspelt with a y, but doubtless this is a slip of the writer or printer.