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Alkaid As The Seventh Star Of The Northern Dipper

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Alkaid As The Seventh Star Of The Northern Dipper

Chinese astronomy names the same seven stars of Ursa Major's bowl and handle Beidou, the Northern Dipper, an asterism with its own long independent tradition distinct from the Greek figure of the Great Bear that happens to share the identical seven stars. Within Beidou, each star carries its own name and, in Daoist religious tradition, its own personified stellar deity; Alkaid is the seventh and outermost star, called Yaoguang, sitting at the tip of the dipper's handle exactly as it sits at the tip of the Western handle asterism.

The Northern Dipper held particular importance in Chinese court astronomy and popular religion alike, its handle's changing orientation through the night and across the seasons used as a practical celestial clock and calendar marker, and its seven stars collectively venerated in Daoist practice as a group of deities overseen by Doumu, the Bushel Mother, sometimes extended to nine stars where two additional, fainter attendant stars are included alongside the seven visible ones. That the same seven stars anchor both a Chinese cosmological and calendrical system and a distinct Arabic funeral procession reading, with no historical contact producing either interpretation from the other, is a clear case of two sky cultures independently finding meaningful pattern in an identical, especially bright and easily traced group of stars.

Sources Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and HistoryJohn Lagerwey with Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the EarthJoseph Needham

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