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Poulia Who Has Seven Children
I saw a small cluster in the night sky as I woke up this morning and didn’t know if it was a real cluster or double vision of my just awaken eyes. I approached the window, and saw one of my favourite sky sights, the Pleiades, also known as Poulia in Greek folklore. A telescope will reveal hundreds of stars in the cluster, but the naked eye only sees six or seven bright spots, sometimes called the Seven Sisters, or in the words of a poet, Poulia Who Has Seven Children. The title of this article is an homage to one of the great poets of the last century, Nobel laureate Odysseas Elytis.
The Greeks were impressed by natural phenomena and formed their religion around them. The richness of their imagination created the most improbable and at the same time the most fascinating stories, in folklore and literature. Those stories, ideas, and beliefs are what we now know as mythology.
In Greek mythology, Maia, the eldest of the seven Pleiades, was the mother of Hermes (Mercury) by Zeus. Taygete was mother of Lacedaemon, first King of Sparta, also by Zeus. Merope was the youngest of the seven sisters. She faded away when she married Sisyphus and became mortal. The other Pleiades are Alcyone, Electra, Celaeno…
