Following the North Star

These are stories of love and Eternity, of deities and disguises, and of ancient knowledge that have receded into mystery. As mysteries go, however, this is one of the most playful:

The little girls are dressed as bear cubs, and they are dancing.

But let's start at the beginning.

First came wide-wandering Eurynome, Goddess of All Things, borne out of Chaos. Eurynome took the North Wind and crafted a great serpent from its air. She named this serpent Ophion; She danced with the snake and then She coupled with it. And then, from their mating, Eurynome birthed all things. All! Among the beings Eurynome brought forth were Phoebe, whose name means "bright," and Coeus, who ruled the intellect and the starry axis of the heavens. Together Phoebe and Coeus had a daughter, Leto.

Her name may come from lethô, "to move unseen." But Leto was seen. Zeus saw, desired, and courted Her. From Her mating with Zeus, Leto bore a pair of remarkable divine twins who, between them, governed Night and Day. They were called Apollo and Artemis—a god of the Sun and a goddess of the Moon.

Artemis was also the goddess of the hunt, the wild places, and all wild creatures, and was Herself devoted to independence. Four prancing, golden-horned deer pulled Her chariot. Sleek hounds and young mortal maidens were Her companions—among them Kallisto, "the fairest one."

Now Zeus saw Kallisto. He pursued her—was He disguised as His own daughter Artemis?—and caught her.

Kallisto remained among Artemis' companions until, one day when all were bathing, Artemis saw that Kallisto was with child. The goddess was furious. Pregnant women shouldn't masquerade as virgin devotees. So Artemis transformed Kallisto into a bear and, calling to Her huntress companions and Her hounds, set out to hunt Her former friend.

Zeus saw all this and intervened. He hid His lover, the bear-Kallisto, high up among the stars, along with a smaller bear—Kallisto's son, Arcus.

One ancient ritual of Artemis was the arteia—"playing the bear"—during which little girls were dressed in honey-colored robes and yellow bear-skins. Costumed as bear cubs, they danced to honor Artemis—as if in a mystery school's kindergarten play, but on a much larger, public scale that included entire city-states. "Playing the bear" was a rite of passage for Athenian girls, their debut into the spiritual life of their city.

So, we begin our story with a goddess and her sensual dancing snake, beings who "move unseen," deities of Day and Night, shape-shifting gods, and the great night sky—especially the great She-Bear who still dwells among the stars, spinning nonstop above us (see figure 1).

The act of starting to write can be vertigo-inducing. In looking for my own starting point—and feeling as if I were going around in circles—I suddenly remembered that this is literally true.

I am going in circles. We all are. The Earth itself is rotating constantly, and we're all along for the ride. We observe this rotation when we watch the Sun "rising" and "setting"; but it's the Earth's own spin that accounts for the Sun's apparent journey across the sky.

Storytelling is sometimes called "spinning a yarn." It's a good image, and a recurring one. We weave a tale, picking up the thread of one theme or another as we go along. There are strands beyond number to the stories of the sky—all interwoven, perhaps even entangled—but most of them come back to that dizzying sense of the Earth's spin and how we and our very distant ancestors have tried to make sense out of the planets, the stars, and the Moon and the Sun whirling above us. This is a book of stories—of threads through time—spun, woven, and hopefully un tangled. We'll look at the lore of the heavens, some sky-related sites that our ancestors created, and ways of enlisting the sky as a spiritual ally now, in our own era. And—especially—we'll look at the sky itself.

As we do that, patterns will gradually begin to emerge, often against a background of deepest blue.

The Earth's motion is visible during the day by watching the Sun, but we see our planet's rotation more vividly in the night sky. Nowhere is it more obvious than around the "Pole Star," Polaris, also known as the North Star. That is our starting point. You can find the North Star using star patterns that many of us learn in childhood—the Big and Little Dippers, more formally known as portions of the Great Bear, Ursa Major, and the Little Bear, Ursa Minor. These two Dipper asterisms (recognizable star groups that aren't constellations) have long been known and valued throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The Big Dipper is the easier of the two to find, thanks to its size and brightness. Once you find the Big Dipper, you can find the North Star (the brightest in Ursa Minor) by using the pointer stars Merak ("the loin," or haunch, of the Bear) and Dubhe (Ursa Major's ITLαITL or brightest star) at the edge of the Dipper farthest from the handle (see figure 2). This is wonderfully useful. Rather than trying to find Polaris, a single star, just search for the larger pattern of a recognizable group and proceed from there. Designations of alpha, beta, and other Greek letters were used early on to rank the relative brightness of individual stars within a constellation.

The Big Dipper is likely to be visible even when viewed from amid the competing lights of a city thanks to two things: Although it rotates, it stays put in the north, so we know where to look, and it has some stars bright enough to cut through city lights. We've become so accustomed to murky, not-really-dark city nights that many of us are startled by the visual overload of stars in a truly dark, rural sky. Ironically, on the other hand, urban light pollution makes it easy to spot the brightest stars by wiping out the competition, and the Big Dipper often manages to blaze through.

Watch this area of sky some night for even half an hour or so and you'll see the steady counterclockwise motion that our Northern Hemisphere ancestors watched for millennia.

Above about 40° N (north) latitude, most of the Big Dipper is visible—or its pointer stars Dubhe and...