Which is the "oldest story of mankind"? The answer may be related to the Seven Fairies!

There are thousands of stories in this world, which one is the oldest?

This question may seem a bit strange at first glance, and it seems impossible to explain it. However, some people have found a solution and an answer.

01 The myth of the Seven Sisters includes six stars

Did Pangu create the world? Did he say "In the beginning, God created the world"? Although these stories all talk about "origins", they are not necessarily very old.

To discuss ancient stories, we need to first introduce a concept: type and motif .

Genre refers to the plot framework of a story, and motif is the key element that recurs in it . This can be seen as the "mother" of the story. If two folk tales from different ethnic groups are in the same genre and use similar motifs, then the two stories may have the same origin. Similarly, based on certain genres and motifs, we can rewrite the story into our own version .

Therefore, many of the famous stories you have heard may not be the original versions of the story. For example, the following story from Greek mythology:

Orion, the most powerful hunter in Greece and nephew of Poseidon, the god of the sea, suddenly fell in love with the seven Pleiades sisters and began to pursue these seven girls madly. Orion was a crazy giant, and pursuing seven girls at the same time, especially sisters, was something that most people could never do.

Of course, the seven Pleiades sisters were not idle. Their father was Atlas, the Titan who held up the sky in Greek mythology, and their mother was Pleione, the goddess of the ocean. So, these seven girls kept running. Orion kept chasing them. There are several versions of the result of this chase. The most famous one says that Zeus, the king of the gods, couldn't stand it anymore ("What? How can someone be more ridiculous than me in this matter!"), so he took action and sent the seven sisters into the sky.

The seven sisters were very close to each other in the sky, but everyone could tell who was who, so this group of things was called the "Seven Sisters". Later, Orion died and was sent to the sky by Zeus, becoming Orion. Until now, Orion has been making gestures to chase the Seven Sisters.

The Seven Sisters are located in Taurus, just behind the two horns of the bull, on the back of the bull's neck. In ancient Chinese astronomy, this is the Pleiades, one of the seven western stars. So some people also call the Seven Sisters the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades.

Taurus and the Pleiades (the one in the red box). Image credit: Eddie Yip, Flickr

However, there has always been a very strange question about the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Why are there only 6 of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades? Yes, although it is called the "Seven Sisters", people can usually only see 6 stars .

This is not a problem that we have discovered today. In ancient times, such as ancient Greece, people discovered this problem. Alatus, who lived in the 3rd century BC, said in his Phenomena:

They gathered together, the small space was extremely crowded, and the light of a single star was extremely dim. There were seven of them in total, and they appeared in human songs; but in fact, there were only six when they were projected into human eyes. [1] Something went wrong, the goods were not what they said. It was clearly said that there were "Seven Sisters", so how come one was missing? The storyteller needed to make things round. Therefore, in the subsequent versions of the myth, there appeared a little tail like this :

Among the seven sisters, the youngest sister, Merope, fell in love with a mortal king. So she left heaven, separated from her identity as a god, and married the king. From then on, there was no place for her among the seven sisters in the sky. So now when we look at the seven sisters, we can only recognize six stars.

Incidentally, the king whom Merope married is also an important character in Greek mythology, probably more famous than any other character in the story of the seven sisters. He is Sisyphus, the scarab-like being who rolls his stone ball over and over all day long.

In short, the story is complete. The description in the myth and the actual astronomical phenomenon are roughly consistent. However, many people still find it very strange: this myth is obviously going in circles. Why bother? Since there are only six stars in that cluster, why not just say "Seven Sisters" from the beginning?

02 The Seven Sisters of Ancient Greece, Six Stars of the World

Gradually, people discovered that there was something fishy about this matter. Mythologists and anthropologists learned about the myths of various nations around the world and found that, “Oh, this is not a simple matter!” Although many places were thousands of miles apart, the myths about the Seven Sisters were almost exactly the same .

For example, there are some tribes in Australia who say that there were seven sisters who were running away from a suitor. They kept running away, but in the end, the youngest sister disappeared. Some said she was captured, and some simply said she died, so only six of the seven sisters were left.

In addition, there is a tribe of native people in North America called Nez Perce. Their myth says that the youngest sister of the Seven Sisters married a mortal. After her mortal husband died, she was very sad and kept crying. Finally, she hid herself in sorrow, so only six of the Seven Sisters can be seen. Another tribe of native people, the Cherokee, said that seven children rose to the sky and became this group of stars, but one of them fell down halfway.

Also, in the mythology of the South Asian Tamils, the seven wives of seven saints ascended to the sky and became stars. Six of them formed the Pleiades, while the other was too stubborn to join them and ran away to the Ursa Major. These myths or folk tales have similar (or even identical) types, and the core plot is that seven people become a group of stars, but one is lost from them.

For anthropologists, it is easy to think that there may be some connection between these stories . However, Greece, Australia, North America and South Asia are so far apart that the transmission and flow of stories probably cannot be achieved overnight. Is there some other hidden story?

03 If a tree is moved, it will die; if a person is moved, he will live; if a star is moved, it will disappear.

Most people can see 6 of the seven sisters with the naked eye. But if a person has very good eyesight, it is possible to see more, such as 9 or 12. Later, humans invented telescopes, which allowed them to see more. In the star map drawn by Galileo, there are 36 stars in the seven sisters. And the star map published by French astronomer Jura in 1786 has as many as 64 stars. Of course, there are only a few stars that can be seen with the naked eye .

The Pleiades. Image source: Wikipedia

One of them is 27 Tauri, which the ancient Chinese called Pleiades 7. Next to it is 28 Tauri, which the ancient Chinese called Pleiades Zeng 12. The extra "Zeng" in the name means that it was recognized very later - during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, Ignaz Kögler and others from the Imperial Astronomical Bureau compiled the "Yi Xiang Kao Cheng" based on the star catalog of John Flamsteed, an Englishman. In ancient China, extra stars were added to the official star system, which was called Zengxing. However, in terms of brightness, this Pleiades Zeng 12 can be ranked seventh in the Pleiades star cluster - don't you think it's strange that it should have been ranked seventh, but in the end it was ranked last? Did it fill in the wrong name when filling out the application form? [3]

In fact, the answer is quite simple, because 7 Pleiades and 22 Pleiades, or 27 Tauri and 28 Tauri, are too close to each other, so close that humans cannot distinguish them with the naked eye.

At the University of Western Sydney in Australia, an astronomer named Ray Norris noticed this problem.

In fact, we don't need to bother astronomers. Anyone who knows a little about astronomy knows that stars also move . This movement does not refer to the rotation and revolution of the stars themselves, but to the position of the stars projected on the sky is not absolutely constant - this is because all the stars in the Milky Way, including the sun, revolve around the "galactic center" in three-dimensional space, so their relative positions will slowly change. However, because they are very, very far away from us, such changes can only be discovered in the era of naked eye observation by comparing thousands of years of observation data.

Based on this premise, there are other possibilities when observing the "disappearing one" among the Seven Sisters: Could it be that people were able to accurately distinguish Tauri 27 and Tauri 28 with the naked eye at the beginning, but gradually they could no longer do so?

Although the movement of stars and the constellations is a grand and lengthy process, it is governed by the laws of physics. Therefore, astronomers can use models to infer the positional relationships between celestial bodies in the universe some time ago - of course, they can also infer them some time later.

Ray Norris and another scientist calculated the movement of the two stars and found that the above hypothesis was true. Long, long ago, humans on Earth could distinguish between 27 Tauri and 28 Tauri. But then, people saw 28 Tauri moving closer to 27 Tauri bit by bit. Over a long period of time, the difference accumulated bit by bit until it was completely obscured by the light of 27 Tauri. They became "one" in the eyes of humans.

So, how long is this time? Norris gave the answer of 100,000 years.

100,000 years ago, the visual distance between 27 Tauri and 28 Tauri was 8.4 arc minutes - we don't need to remember this value, anyway, 100,000 years ago, the two were distinguishable enough for humans with the naked eye . 100,000 years ago, 27 Tauri and 28 Tauri were still clearly distinguishable, but in 2020 they almost overlap.

Image source: Reference [4]

But why 100,000 years?

04 Major Human Events

In the eyes of humans, the speed of the stars moving is very slow. Logically speaking, humans could have seen the "seven stars" 110,000 to 200,000 years ago, or 80,000 to 90,000 years ago. But Norris chose to use the scale of 100,000 years. He had his reasons.

Because, for humans, 100,000 years ago, this was a very special moment .

Out of Africa .

Research into the evolution of modern humans has established some basic facts. For example, modern humans first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Then, our ancestors lived in eastern Africa for a long time.

About 100,000 years ago, human ancestors walked out of Africa and began to spread across the land. They first arrived in Asia, then Europe, then America, and finally, they took a ship to the continent and island chain deep in the Pacific Ocean. During this long journey, the stars above were an important guide. The Pleiades were one of the earliest astronomical phenomena to be identified. It can be imagined that the Pleiades played a very important role in early human activities and religious life, and needed to be observed and described frequently.

However, during this process, people gradually discovered that the Seven Sisters, which they could originally accurately distinguish, seemed to have changed. One star became invisible, and the Seven Sisters became Six Sisters.

Will they change the original story? **The myth originally brought out by their ancestors from East Africa, about the group of stars being made up of seven girls, will it need to be revised and rationalized according to the new observations? **The youngest of the seven sisters came down to earth to marry a human - will this be a patch on an ancient story?

This is undoubtedly an overly bold conjecture. But if it is true, then this story should have originated in an era before the world was divided and languages ​​were not chaotic; it should have been born on the oldest continent of mankind and was a legend shared by all mankind before the expedition began . At that time, the position of the North Star still belonged to Vega, the shapes of the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor still looked like bears, and the seven sisters were still escaping from hunters in the sky, not knowing that one of them would fall to the earth 100,000 years later...

This will be the oldest story of mankind .

05 Will the Seven Fairies be the seventh fairy?

At this point, you may have thought that the story of the Seven Sisters is very similar to the story of the Seven Fairies! Could it be that the youngest fairy of the Seven Sisters came to China and married Dong Yong?

The story of Dong Yong and the Seven Fairies is very different from the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, but they are closely related . The Summer Triangle, with Vega in the red frame and Altair in the yellow frame.

Copyright images in the gallery. Reprinting and using them may lead to copyright disputes.

The story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl is very ancient. It can be found in the Book of Songs. The poem Xiaoya Dadong records many astronomical phenomena, among which are mentioned "Standing on tiptoe to see the Weaver Girl" and "Looking at the Cowherd". In the Nineteen Ancient Poems of the Han Dynasty, the story of the Weaver Girl had a strong narrative quality.

Dong Yong is generally considered to be a real person. His story is engraved on the stone reliefs of the Han Dynasty. Cao Zhi also mentioned him in "Lingzhi Pian", "Heavenly inspiration and great virtue, the goddess is the master." Later, Gan Bao of the Eastern Jin Dynasty enriched this plot in "Soushen Ji", saying that Dong Yong was very filial and sold himself to bury his father, and the "Weaver Girl of Heaven" married Dong Yong to help him - at this time, the Weaver Girl had not yet developed into the Seven Fairies, and Dong Yong was not described as a cowherd.

However, after this, Dong Yong's story did not develop immediately. The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl became the mainstream narrative. Yin Yun, a writer in the Xiaoliang period of the Southern Dynasties, mentioned in "Novel":

To the east of the Milky Way there was a Weaver Girl, the daughter of the Emperor of Heaven. Year after year she toiled at her loom, weaving brocade clothes for the heavens, and had no time to take care of her appearance. The Emperor felt sorry for her loneliness, so he promised her to marry the Cowherd to the west of the river. After the marriage, she stopped weaving. The Emperor of Heaven was angry and ordered her to return to the east and west, but allowed them to meet once a year.

In this way, it was finally clarified that the story was about a newlywed couple who delayed production and were punished by their leaders . The "annual magpie bridge meeting" in the contemporary story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl also had its prototype here. However, whether it was the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl or the story of Dong Yong, there was no mention of the seven fairies or seven sisters.

In the Ming Dynasty's "Qingpingshantang Stories: Dong Yong Meets the Fairies", there is still no direct mention of "Seven Fairies", but only "Weaver Girl". However, the story mentions that among all the fairies, "the seventh one in yellow is the one", which finally presents the number "seven". Later, folk tales and opera stories continued to be enriched, and finally it was finalized into the "Dong Yong and the Seven Fairies" we see today.

In this sense, the story of "Dong Yong and the Seven Fairies" has little to do with the story of the Seven Sisters. It is almost impossible that it originated from "the oldest story of mankind". However, it is the Qixi Festival at this moment, and the tenderness is like water and the good time is like a dream. Under the starry sky, isn't it a wonderful thing to talk about the myth of the Seven Sisters and a series of interesting stories triggered by it, and even whisper in the middle of the night when no one is there?

Of course, I still have to emphasize at the end that, strictly speaking, "The Ascension and Descent of the Seven Sisters" is not "the first story of mankind", but perhaps "the oldest story known to mankind" .

But with the help of mythology, comparative anthropology, astronomy and human evolution research, this process of exploration and reasoning is indeed real and fascinating .

References

[1]Classical Texts Library>>Aratus, Phaenomena

[2] Wikipedia

[4] Ray P. Norris, Barnaby RM Norris. Why are there Seven Sisters?

Author: Xu Lai, a popular science writer

Fang Gang, science writer

Reviewer: Yu Heng, Associate Professor, Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University