A River, a Road, a Fish, a Path

The bright band that crosses the whole sky is the disc of the home galaxy seen from inside, and almost every tradition has decided what it is. In China it is the Silver River, or the Celestial River, the stream that separates the Weaver Girl from the Herdboy, the stars Vega and Altair, who are permitted to meet across it one night each year at the Qixi festival. In Greece and Rome it was the road of milk, spilled from the breast of Hera, and the Latin name Via Lactea is the direct ancestor of the English Milky Way.

Medieval England read it as a road as well, but a particular one: Chaucer records that people called it Watling Street, the great highway laid across the sky to match the one laid across the land. In the Andes it is Mayu, the river, and Quechua communities describe its dark clouds as animals drinking from it, with the river carrying water through the sky and returning it to earth as rain.

Across much of eastern North America it is the Path of Souls, the road the dead walk toward the land of the ancestors. To the Maori it is Te Ika Roa, the long fish stretched across the night. Each of these readings is held on this page as its own tradition-scoped fact, because they are different claims about one object, and the atlas does not choose among them in its own voice.