Celestial Love Stories

If love is in the air this spring, there is no better place to find it than looking up at the night sky.

In Roman mythology, Orion was a handsome hunter who was loved by Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Aurora, goddess of the dawn. Oblivious to their affections, Orion wanders across the sky at night until he sets in the west.

Made teary-eyed by his inattention, Aurora weeps each night, which becomes the dew on the morning grass. Jealous that Aurora will win Orion’s heart, Diana fires an arrow at the hunter’s eyes, blinding him. That is why the stars in Orion’s head, where his eyes would be, are unclear.

The Monache Indians, who once lived on the Tule River Reservation in Central California, told another love story, about Pleiades and what we know as Taurus the Bull. The Monache knew that sometimes love must be allowed to stink.

They told of how there were once six wives and a daughter who discovered onions. When their husbands returned from successfully hunting cougar, they proudly showed their new side dish. But the husbands thought that the women, who had been eating the onions, smelled horrible and ordered them to sleep outside.

The next days did not go well. The men returned after each hunt without any cougar, which they blamed on the foul onion odor clinging to their clothes. The women grew colder and colder as they were forced, each night, to sleep outside.

Finally, the wives had had enough. They took the daughter, grabbed some magic rope and threw it into the sky. When the men returned to spot the women climbing into the sky, they suddenly felt lonely and hungry, and called after them to stop. But the women had no desire to be with such uncaring husbands. Desperate, the men chased into the sky after the women.

Today, you can see the men desperately seeking their wives’ forgiveness as the sky turns. The women are the six bright stars of the Pleiades (the daughter is the faint seventh star) and the husbands are just behind them in the stars of the Hyades, in what we know as the head of Taurus the Bull.