PLEIADES by Mark Molnar

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The Pleiades were originally Oceanids, claimed by Ovid to be “children who were glorious among goddesses” and were water keepers, dispersed about the earth and serving in deep waters who would emerge along coast lines, and whom aided men in inhospitable places, often as diviners that could reveal “some spring of water from the rock of a sacred flow that bloomed from the earth”. They were the origin of knowledge, but were taken over and bent to servitude by male powers in Greek myths.

The Pleiades (Maia, Elektra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope) were all forced to bear children by gods, and were tied to their counterparts the Hyades, who brought the rains from October to April in the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea, and were daughters of Atlas and Aethra (another Oceanid bent to husbandry).

When the Hyades were rewarded as the stars at the head of the constellation of Taurus for having raised Dionysus, or were changed into these stars by Zeus when he witnessed their grief at the loss of their brother, Hyas, their Oceanid mirrors, the Pleiades, fell into deep and turbulent grief, and either committed suicide at the loss of connections to their sisters, or were turned into the constellation of stars and relegated to the firmament by Zeus and Artemis, who could not protect them on earth from the lust and stalking of the Boeotian giant Orion, he whom also became a constellation so that he could remain close to Merope at tail of the Pleiades constellation. Orion was subsumed from the ancient Aram and his descendants are figured in the constellation Nephîlā′, and are represented in Christian mythology as the Nephilim, or Giants born of angels and women, and the bearers of knowledge after the Fall, of Genesis (6:4), whom God sends the flood to destroy and eradicate from the lives of men for their predation over women.

The Pleiades are only known to us now through a handful of quotes in tale, drama, song, and verse, and only in relation to their service, obedience, and oppression by men. Latent in these quotes are prehistories, nearly erased by men, and disavowed from the remaining bloom of mythology, cast into the sky as objects of beauty and rarified form, without voice, and robbed of agency and form.
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Mark Molnar plays strings and electronics with Horseman, Pass By.,1/4 Tonne (w. Nick Keupfer and Eric Craven), Land of Kush, Black Seas Ensemble, and Kingdom Shore. He is the founder of Black Bough Records. His music has been performed by Quasar4 (Mtl.), and the Thin Edge Music Collective (TO.), and he contributed string arrangements to Buried Inside, Alaskan, Black Seas, and Kee Avil.

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