“I’m ancient, bitch!”
Syncs happen in the durndest places in the durndest ways.
So I’m riding the the 14 tram home with my teenage daughter Saturday night when we come to a stop called fiastyúk utca (Mother Hen Street), a stop I’ve passed countless times over the years. I remark that it’s struck me often what an odd name for a street it is.
“You know, don’t you,” she says, “that it’s also the name of a constellation, right?”
Well, no, I didn’t know that. Hmmmm, I think to myself, I wonder which one. I get out my handy-dandy android phone, fire up my Hungarian-English lexicon app, type in fiastyúk, and when I see the translation I just about shit myself. It’s the Hungarian name for The Pleiades. Wait, what?
As y’all know, I went to London to personally pick up my copy of Gordon’s revolutionary new NSFSC (Not Safe For Sacred Cows) magical history book Star.Ships. I also managed to score an afternoon of “daytime drinking” (his words) with Gordon, which is the subject of another posting.
I’ve been squeezing reading sessions in between busily seething at home and office, and once I finish Star.Ships I will give it a proper review. But this sync just screams to be written about right now.
I’m not really risking any spoilers if I say that Gordon’s book lines up the evidence (based on a 13-page biography of weighty works) for a revised understanding of prehistory, in which the human race has had a sophisticated culture and potent technical knowledge for as long as 100,000 years. Part of his case is based on conclusions to be drawn from comparative star lore/mythology (they are intricately intertwined) that shows we have been long-distance land- and sea navigators since… well… long before The Flood. In building this case he dedicates a lot of text to discussing the importance of the constellations Orion and The Pleiades to both navigation and myths/star lore, throughout the world. Particularly he talks about how myths about sisters are associated with The Pleiades in far-flung cultures around the world; a connection that cannot be adequately explained by the canonical historical narrative being taught by academia. If you want to know why this is important, read Gordon’s book!
Reading Star.Ships and mulling over it’s contents as I commute and walk around the city, The Pleiades have been on my mind frequently the last two weeks. So discovering that the name of a street I pass regularly is actually the Hungarian name for the Pleiades really got my attention.
I quickly went into research mode.
Turns out that Norse culture referred to the constellation as Freya’s hens, and that in many old European languages the constellation bore a name referring to a hen and her chicks.
Norse? There’s little reason the Hungarian language would refer to Norse myths. Not much contact be those cultures. And Hungarian star lore would have been formulated by the Magyars long before they ever left Asia and settled in the Carpathian Basin, so it is unlikely they were influenced by European languages and lore in this case.
But, interestingly, Thai star lore associates the Pleiades with a mother hen. I suspect the Hungarian association of the Pleiades with a mother hen has more to do with the source of the Thai story than with the European outliers. Or are they all derived from something very ancient from another source I haven’t identified yet?
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more data on this story.