One Sky, Many Readings: Constellations Beyond the Greek List

The figure is read from the dark dust lanes of the Milky Way rather than from stars, with the Coalsack as its head. Peoples across Australia with no shared language or ceremony recognise it, and its changing orientation through the year times the collecting of emu eggs.

The Andean llama is also a dark cloud figure, read from the Milky Way dust lanes, with two bright stars of Centaurus as its eyes. The Huarochiri manuscript says it comes down at midnight to drink, and that without its drinking the world would flood.

The serpent is the first of the Andean dark animals to rise, ahead of the toad, the tinamou, the llama and the fox. The point of the sequence is that the order itself is a calendar, a system that Spanish observers recorded as superstition without recognising it.

The tinamou, a ground bird that freezes rather than flees, completes the Andean view of the dark sky as a connected system. Its crouching shape is read as the bird, and its place in the rising order is used to reckon the season.

Here the stars are ordinary, but the reading is not. The Yolngu of Arnhem Land see a canoe in the stars the Greek tradition calls the belt and sword of Orion: three brothers who ate a forbidden fish and were taken into the sky with it and the flame of their fire.

The same stars of Orion were a standing female figure in pre-Islamic Arabia, not a hunter. Two modern star names keep her: Betelgeuse comes from yad al-jauza, her hand, and Rigel from rijl al-jauza, her foot.

In Egypt the Orion stars are Sah, identified with Osiris, drawn on star ceilings as a striding figure who looks back over his shoulder with a sceptre. His rising is bound up with Sopdet, the star Sirius, whose return announced the Nile flood, and the Pyramid Texts place the dead king among the stars with him.

Turning to the Great Bear, the Arabic sky sees a funeral procession: the four stars of the bowl are a bier, and the three of the handle are the daughters walking behind it in mourning. The faint star Alcor beside Mizar, called Suha, served as a test of eyesight.

Egypt read the same seven stars as the severed foreleg of a bull, or an adze of the same shape, associated with Set. The adze is also the tool touched to the mummy in the opening of the mouth ceremony, and these northern stars never set at Egyptian latitude, so the funerary ritual and the sky are tied together deliberately.

China reads these stars as the Northern Dipper. Han sources make it the chariot of the celestial sovereign, keeping the seasons in order as its handle swings around the pole, and Daoist practice addresses it in rites for long life. It is distinct from Dou, the Southern Dipper among the lunar mansions.

The Pleiades are the most important asterism in the pre-Islamic Arabian reckoning of the year. Their heliacal setting and rising govern the anwa, the rain stars, and the cluster is called simply al-Najm, the star, as though no other needed naming.

The same cluster is the rattle of a rattlesnake in Maya thought, which places the whole creature in the sky by implication. Its zenith passage falls near the start of the rainy season at Maya latitudes, and the page notes that the Arabic, Maya and Maori readings of the Pleiades share nothing but the stars.