Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but for the last… oh… year, year-and-a-half-ish,
the majority of humanity was, shall we say, confined to the indoors.
Travel options were very limited, and for various reasons, social engagements were greatly
reduced.
Stuck in one place and with nothing to capture my attention but the entire corpus of all
human knowledge and every movie ever made, I ended up coping with the isolation by developing
something of an archaic hobby - stargazing.
And it turns out, the more time you spend staring at the sky, the more stuff you notice
about it.
What were the odds?
And when you’ve got very little to do most nights but stare up at a very slowly shifting
pattern of lights, you end up noticing the little changes.
Sure, the moon is the most obvious, shifting phases every night and rising later every
day, and if you’ve got an eye for it you can even spot the planets in slightly different
relative positions every night - but if you’ve been staring at the sky for, say, a week,
you might notice the familiar stars have shifted too.
And within a brisk 365.256 days, the sun makes a complete circuit through the fixed stars
and the night sky returns to its starting position - discounting the moon and planets,
which are just kinda doing their own thing.
As it turns out, when you don’t have a lot else going on, the sky changing is one of
the easiest ways to keep track of time passing.
Who knew, right?
Someone should write this down!
Now I started getting serious with the stargazing back in June of 2020, when the most prominently
visible star in the night sky was this little guy, Vega.
A mere 25 light-years away and only slightly dimmer than Arcturus, Vega is kind of a superstar
(pun absolutely intended) in the field of astronomical observation.
It was the first star besides the sun to be photographed way back in 1850, and in 1872
it was the first star to have its electromagnetic spectrum officially recorded.
It’s used as a baseline point of comparison when measuring the brightness of stars and
classifying them by spectral type.
It’s also just very bright and easy to spot during the northern hemisphere summer months,
when it forms the large asterism The Summer Triangle with the stars Deneb and Altair.
Vega is part of the constellation Lyra, which is usually seen as a vulture or eagle.
Deneb and Altair are in similar boats, found in the constellations Cygnus and Aquila, respectively
a swan and an eagle.
All three of these bird constellations were part of Ptolemy’s original 48 traditional
greek constellations set down in the 100s CE, but they were most likely derived from
the earlier Babylonian star catalogues.
But it wasn’t just the mediterranean that saw bird-like significance in this cluster
of stars.
As early as eight hundred years prior, China was telling the story of a tragic, doomed
romance between the stars Vega and Altair, and by the Han dynasty the myth had its own
festival celebrating the one day of the year the lovers could be reunited - the Qixi festival,
held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.
So let’s talk about it!
Now our story begins… a little vaguely.
This kind of folkloric myth doesn’t really have an original version, at least not one
we have any access to.
It’s not strictly codified anywhere, and while the very basic structure of the story
is always the same, there’s a lot of variation in the specific details.
The myth also has slightly different versions in Japan and Korea, celebrated on their own
festival days.
So we don’t have a definitive telling to go on, but the general gist is that one night,
seven divine sisters, all daughters of the Jade Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West,
descend from the heavens to take a little skinny-dip in a local lake.
The youngest of these sisters is Zhinu, literally “Weaver Girl,” a minor goddess whose general
duties involve weaving rainbows and colorful clouds.
So while she and the others are splashing around having a grand old time, a local cowherd
called Niu Lang - which…
literally just means “Cowherd” - hears the commotion and heads out to investigate,
and when he spots the goddesses, he decides it’d be a great idea to see what happens
if he steals their clothes.
So the ladies finish up their party and gear up to leave, only to find that their clothes
are missing, which kind of scuttles the whole “sneaking back into heaven inconspicuously”
plan.
The weaver girl finds the cowherd and retrieves the clothes, but seeing as he’s seen her
naked now, she decides that she should stay on earth with him rather than returning to
heaven, since it wouldn’t be proper not to marry him after that, and also, less problematically,
because they’ve fallen madly in love at first sight.
The other six sisters reluctantly return to heaven while the weaver girl and the cowherd
get happily married, forge a beautiful life together on earth and have two children.
But the weaver girl's absence doesn’t go unnoticed for long.
The Queen Mother Of The West realizes she’s missing and finds out about her forbidden
marriage with this random mortal dude.
She orders the weaver girl to return to her heavenly duties immediately, and with no real
way to turn down the queen of heaven herself, the weaver girl complies, reluctantly leaving
Earth and going back to her boring daily routine of weaving magical clouds and rainbows and
stuff.
Ugh, back to the grind, am I right?
Now obviously the cowherd is none too pleased to find that his wife has gone missing, and
with the help of his superintelligent ox who he’s had this whole time don’t even worry
about it, he takes his children and sails up into the heavens after the weaver girl.
But their heartfelt reunion is scuttled by the Queen Mother of the West, who tears the
sky with her hairpin, forming the Silver River between them.
With no way across, the weaver girl and the cowherd are left forever separated, the weaver
girl as the star Vega and the cowherd and their children as Altair and the two dimmer
stars that hang out around it.
The Silver River is the arc of the milky way that cuts between them.
But once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month, a bridge of magpies forms over
the star Deneb, bridging the Silver River and allowing the lovers to reunite for a single
day.
Beautiful, heartwarming, remind me to never pick a fight with a magpie, apparently those
little scamps are stronger than they look.
(Time After Time)