15

Appendix 15

As concerns the removing of the Pole star, the most drastic version is told by the Lapps:

When Arcturus (alpha Bootis, supposed to be an archer, Ursa Major being his bow) shoots down the North Nail with his arrow on the last day, the heaven will fall, crushing the earth and setting fire to everything. [1]

Other legends prefer to deal with the fate of circumpolar stars, the result being the same.

The Siberian Kirghis call the three stars of the Little Bear nearest the Pole star, which form an arch, a “rope” to which the two larger stars of the same constellation, the two horses, are fastened. One of the horses is white, the other bluish-grey. The seven stars of the Great Bear they call the seven watchmen, whose duty it is to guard the horses from the lurking wolf. When once the wolf succeeds in killing the horses the end of the world will come. In other tales the stars of the Great Bear are “seven wolves” who pursue those horses. Just before the end of the world they will succeed in catching them. Some even fancy that the Great Bear is also tied to the Pole Star. When once all the bonds are broken there will be a great disturbance in the sky. [2]

According to South Russian folklore, a dog is fettered to Ursa Minor, and tries constantly to bite through the fetter; when he succeeds, the end of the world has come.

Others say that Ursa Major consists of a team of horses. with harness; every night a black dog is gnawing at the harness, in order to destroy the world, but he does not reach his aim; at dawn, when he runs to a spring to drink, the harness renews itself. [3]

A very strange and apparently stone-old story is told by the Skidi-Pawnee about the end and the beginning of the world. [4]

Various portents will precede: the moon will turn red and the sun will die in the skies. The North Star is the power which is to preside at the end of all things, as the Bright Star of Evening was the ruler when life began. The Morning Star, the messenger of heaven, which revealed the mysteries of fate to the people, said that in the beginning, at the first great council which apportioned to star folk their stations, two of the people fell ill. One of these was old, and one was young. They were placed upon stretchers, carried by stars (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor), [5] and the two stretchers were tied to the North Star. Now the South Star, the Spirit Star, or Star of Death, comes higher and higher in the heavens, and nearer and nearer to the North Star, and when the time for the end of life draws nigh, the Death Star will approach so close to the North Star that it will capture the stars that bear the stretchers and cause the death of the persons who are lying ill upon those stellar couches. The North Star will then disappear and move away and the South Star will take possession of earth and its people. The command for the ending of all things will be given by the North Star, and the South Star will carry out the commands. Our people were made by the stars. When the time comes for all things to end our people will turn into small stars and will fly to the South Star where they belong."

To return to better known provinces, Proclus informs us that the fox star nibbles continuously at the thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth; German folklore adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end. [6] This fox star is no other than Alcor, [7] the small star g near zeta Ursae Majoris (in India Arundati, the common wife of the Seven Rishis, alpha-eta Ursae; see p. 301 about Arundati and Elamitic Narundi, sister of the Sibitti, the “Seven”), known as such since Babylonian times. [8]

The same star crosses our way again in the Scholia to Aratus [9] where we are told that it is Electra, mother of Dardanus, who left her station among the Pleiades, desperate because of Ilion’s fall, and retired “above the second star of the beam . . . others call this star ‘fox’.”

This small piece of evidence may show the reader two things: (1) that the Fall of Troy meant the end of a veritable world-age. (For the time being, we assume that the end of the Pleiadic age is meant; among various reasons, because Dardanos came to Troy after the third flood, according to Nonnos.); (2) that Ursa Major and the Pleiades figuring on the shield of Achilles, destroyer of Troy, have a precise significance, and are not to be taken as testimony for the stupendous ignorance of Homer who knew none but these constellations, as the specialists want us to believe. There are, indeed, too many traditions connecting Ursa and the Pleiades with this or that kind of catastrophe to be overlooked. Among the many we mention only one example from later Jewish legends, some lines taken out of a most fanciful description of Noah’s flood, quoted by Frazer: [10]

Now the deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades; and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get them till after the Last Day.

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  1. U. Holmberg, *Finno-Ugric and *Siberian Mythology (1964), p. 221. See the drawing made by J. Turi in *Das Buch des *Lappen Turi (1912), plate XIV: Arcturus = Favtna, Polaris/North Nail = Boaje-naste, or Bohinavlle.

  2. Holmberg, p. 425; cf. Holmberg’s *Die *Religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938), p. 40.

  3. A. Olrik, Ragnarök (1919), pp. 309f. The author regards it as “ein neues Motiv, dass der Hund am Himmel angebracht ist und mit den Sternbildern zu tun hat. Sonst haben wir die Hunde in einem Berg am Ende der Welt . . .”

  4. H. B. Alexander, North American Mythology (1916), pp. 116f.

  5. The Sioux take Ursa Major for a coffin, accompanied by mourners. This picture is not too “obvious,” so it is significant that Ursa is banat na’sh with the Arabs, i.e., the bier and its daughters; the bier is formed by the chest of the wagon, El-na’sh, the handle of the Dipper being the daughters. See Ideler, Sternnamen, pp. 19f. Kunitzsch, *Arabische Sternnamen in *Europa, p. 149, no. 71, adds that, according to Athanasius Kircher, christianized Arabs recognized in the constellation the coffin of Lazarus, followed by the mourners Maryam, Marta, and their maid (al-ama). See also Henninger, ZfE 79, p. 81. Due to Islamic influence, the constellation is called bintang al’nash, star of the bier, by the people of Minangkabau, Southern Sumatra. (See H. Werner, “Die Verstirnung des Osiris-Mythos,” IAfE 16 [1954], p. 154.)

  6. (Proklos ad Hesiod, opp. 382) Boll and Gundel, in Roscher s.v. Sternbilder, col. 876.

  7. For the name Alcor, and its tradition, see Kunitzsch, pp. 125f.

  8. See F. X. Kugler, S.J., Ergänzungsheft zum I. u. 2 Buch (1935), pp. 55f.; P. F. Gössmann, Planetarium Babylonicum: “The star at the beam of the wagon is the fox star: Era, the powerful among the gods. In astrological usage, it represents above all the planet Mars/Nergal.” See also E. F. Weidner, Handbuch Babyl. Astr. (1915), p. 141; E. Burrows, S.J., “The Constellation of the Wagon and Recent Archaeology,” in Festschrift Deimel (1935), pp. 34, 36. The said Nergal, i.e., Mars, to whom “belongs” Alcor in the Series mulAPIN, starts the first flood, as we learn from Utnapishtim — see p. 297 — under the name of Era, he succeeds in starting a new one, according to the Era-Epos.

  9. 257; E. Maass, Commentariorum in Aratum Reliquae (1898), p. 391, 11. 3ff.

  10. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918), vol. 1, pp. 143f.