The Daughters of Atlas: The Mythic Genealogy of the Pleiades Across Cultures

The Pleiades, a tight cluster gleaming in the shoulder of Taurus, are universally known as the daughters of Atlas—a genealogy that anchors them in myth, timekeeping, and the architecture of the world. Their story is never singular. In every culture that charted the heavens, the Pleiades are woven into the bloodlines of heroes, the fates of harvests, and the origins of law.

In Greek tradition, the Seven Sisters—Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope—are born of Atlas, the Titan who shoulders the axis of the cosmos, and the Oceanid Pleione, the memory of deep waters. The Pleiades are pursued by Orion, who stalks them eternally across the sky; their escape is secured only by transformation, fixed in their position as both prey and precedent for the hunter’s arrival. Their children populate the most ancient genealogies: Maia births Hermes, Electra the Trojan line, Taygete the line of Sparta. The blood of the Pleiades is woven into every founding story, lending legitimacy and sacred sanction to the ruling houses of mythic Greece.

Yet the motif of the Seven Sisters—always daughters, always mourners, always harbingers—runs far deeper. In Mesopotamia, the Pleiades are the Mul.MUL, celestial seeds sown by the god of agriculture, heralding the great ploughing and the festival of the dead. In Egypt, they appear as the “Followers of Osiris,” seven goddesses who lament and guard the body of the dismembered king, their rising and setting regulating both the work of harvest and the rites of mourning. In ancient India, the Krittikas are the foster mothers of Karttikeya, the god of war, and serve as asterisms by which the year is counted and the boundaries of proper sacrifice are fixed.

In Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pleiades are the “Daughters of the Night,” the key to the timing of nomadic migrations and animal husbandry; their heliacal rising triggers the movement of herds, their disappearance the time for mourning and restraint. Among the Māori of New Zealand, Matariki is a cluster of ancestral mothers whose appearance marks the new year, a season of remembrance and renewal. Even in the Americas, the Pleiades appear in genealogies: the Hopi call them the “Chase Clan,” and the Navajo read in their number the cosmic assembly of gods.

Everywhere, the Pleiades encode genealogy—not merely the descent of families, but the transmission of order itself. They are both the origin and the limit, the opening of the agricultural year and its closure, the announcers of festivals and the arbiters of sorrow. Their story is never still: they are daughters of Atlas because they hold up the sky in his absence, distributing his burden across the multiplicity of time, lineage, and fate.

What is constant is the technical role of the Pleiades as timekeepers, their mythic genealogy a mechanism for the allocation of power, legitimacy, and memory. Each culture assigns them daughters, sisters, mothers, nurses, mourners, or judges, but always as the node through which the cycles of birth, increase, and death must be passed. In following the fate of the Pleiades across cultures, one traces the invisible architecture that joins the stars above to the transmission of life, law, and remembrance below—a genealogy not only of persons, but of time itself.