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The Seven Sisters, Kungkarangkalpa, one of the great songlines of the Australian desert, is this atlas's only bridge from myth into its own entry for the star cluster the Greek list calls the Pleiades.

A Chase Written Into the Ground

A group of ancestral women travels and a man pursues them, and the country they crossed carries the record of the chase in named rock holes, soaks, hills and formations, so that the sequence of features in the ground is the sequence of the narrative. The line runs for thousands of kilometres through the country of many nations under many names, Kungkarangkalpa among Anangu, Minyipuru among Martu, and others elsewhere, and each nation holds the section that crosses its own land rather than the whole.

Where the Chase Ends, and What Stays Untold

At the end the sisters rise into the sky as the compact cluster of young blue stars in the shoulder of Taurus, the Pleiades, with the pursuer following as the stars of Orion. This atlas's own Pleiades entry records it as the most widely named object in the night sky, called the Seven Sisters in Greece, Krittika in India, Al-Thurayya in Arabia, Subaru in Japan, Matariki across Polynesia, its dawn risings and settings marking planting, sailing and new year seasons on every inhabited continent. But a great deal of the Kungkarangkalpa narrative is women's knowledge, restricted by gender and by initiation, so the public account custodians have chosen to present is not a complete telling, and this atlas holds it that way rather than filling the gap.

Where To Read More

• The Seven Sisters (Kungkarangkalpa)Ancestral Being Cycle MythsThe songline itself, this atlas's only bridge from myth into the Pleiades entry, part of it restricted knowledge
• PleiadesShared SkyThe cluster the sisters become, the most widely named object in the night sky under many other traditions' own names