When the Sisters Call

The sky that opens ceremony

The first thing the Seven Sisters do in Australian initiation is keep time. Their heliacal and evening risings come in the cold season, precisely when large ceremonial gatherings were held across inland and southern Australia. A bell is also a timekeeper. The sisters do not merely happen to be up when initiations occur. Their appearance is the moment the hidden business may begin.

At Ooldea, on the western edge of South Australia, the Yugarilya sisters are pursued by Nyeeruna in Orion. In the Flinders Ranges the cluster’s rising marks the Adnyamathanha boys’ rite, malkada. Far to the west, among Andagarinja women at Yalata and Indulkana, a Seven Sisters drama is performed during the girls’ seclusion. The same stars summon both sides of the sexual division: the men’s cutting and teaching, the girls’ confinement and emergence.

The rising is a command: to assemble, to segregate, to warn women and children away, to begin the food restrictions, to lay out the ground, and to bring the sacred things out of hiding. Everywhere the Pleiades touch initiation, they do it as actors inside the rite.

The Arrernte put the sisters over the knife

Among the Arrernte, Carl Strehlow was told, the Pleiades are the tracks of a band of girls, and their rising brings the frost: the season when the boys were circumcised. In the Finke Gorge the rocks were made by the feet of the Pleiades women as they danced. The dancing women in the sky and the boy under the knife belong to one season and one event.

Spencer and Gillen provide the rest of the Arrernte machinery. The smaller bored wooden churinga, the churinga irula, are the bullroarers proper. Women and uninitiated men are excluded from them on pain of blinding or death. At circumcision their roar is said by women and children to be the voice of the great spirit Twanyirika coming to take the boy away. The boy is being removed from one condition and remade in another, and the unseen roar tells the camp it is happening now.

Sacred boards, the roar, and the Pleiades women above the camp lock together. The sisters are built into the staging of the novice’s death and return.

In the Flinders Ranges the sisters start both sexes of initiation

In the Flinders Ranges, among the Adnyamathanha, the rising of the Pleiades marks the season of malkada, the boys’ initiation. Among the Andagarinja women of Yalata and Indulkana a Seven Sisters drama is performed during the girls’ initiation and seclusion. The same cluster governs male and female thresholds across the desert.

That double use matters because initiation is always about controlled separation. Boys are taken from mothers and hidden with men. Girls are secluded from ordinary traffic and remade under women’s discipline. For both rites to answer to the same female star-group means the cluster had become a continent-level sign of threshold, not merely a male badge or a women’s story. The sisters stand over the passage itself.

In Central Australia the sisters watch the novice. In the Flinders they open the boys’ season. In the west they enter the girls’ drama. At Ooldea and farther west they are the pursued women with Orion behind them. Timing, surveillance, performance, and pursuit: one ceremonial syntax in different dialects.

Ooldea and the Western Desert keep Orion on the sisters’ track

At Ooldea the story reaches its classic form. The Yugarilya sisters are the Pleiades. Nyeeruna is Orion. He pursues them endlessly, his desire frustrated, his body written in the stars, his right hand the red star Betelgeuse flaring with fire magic as he closes on them. Across the Western Desert the women are Kungkarungkara and the pursuer is Nyiru in Orion or in Orion’s Belt.

Initiation is gendered pursuit made sacred. Men take the boys from the women, and the roar of the hidden instrument tells the camp the male side has them. At Ooldea the pursuit is enacted in male initiation. Among the Aranda the roar chases novices and drives women and children away. Among the Lunga Orion’s Belt is the stick thrown after the runaway bullroarer. Among the Ngadadjara the Pleiades women travel with the makers of a great board in the Milky Way. Each tradition keeps a different joint of the same machine.

Among the Aranda at Hermannsburg, Géza Róheim heard how the namatuna was whirled in initiation to chase the novices, and all night to frighten away the women and children. At Gerard on the Murray, decades later, the South Australian Museum recorded a bullroarer message sent from Jalukari. The instrument does not only sound inside the sacred ground. It calls people toward it.

Western Australia carries the sisters into the dark board sky

In the west the sacred board goes into the sky. Billingee at Broome gave Bates the Pleiades as beering, “our sisters,” and the dark patch in the Milky Way as Kalleegooroo, a sacred and secret carved board; Leeberr made that dark place and showed the way up to it. At Eucla the Pleiades are Yaggaingurra, a lot of women, mothers; Orion is Mammaingurra, the fathers; and the dark patch is the shadow of the yinma, the sacred long board. In the Warburton Ranges the Wati Kutjara make a great totem board in the Milky Way on a journey with the Pleiades women.

Sisters, Orion, fathers, sacred board, and dark sky-place share one vocabulary. The full western chain is laid out in The Bullroarer in the Coalsack. Once the Pleiades sit on the same page as the sacred board in the sky, this is no longer a tale of girls and a hunter. It is the initiation apparatus entire.

The sisters belong to the whole initiation complex

The Pleiades are not seven women in a storybook sky. They are the female cluster that rises when initiations are due, dances over the novice in Arrernte country, governs boys’ initiation in Adnyamathanha country, enters girls’ initiation drama in Andagarinja country, flies ahead of Orion at Ooldea and across the Western Desert, and reappears in Western Australia beside the sacred board hidden in the dark Milky Way. A single ceremonial machine is visible through all those placements.

That machine has stable moving parts. There is a female line in the sky, almost always the Pleiades. There is a male line pursuing or counterposed to it, often Orion or Orion’s Belt. There is a hidden sounded object, whether explicitly the bullroarer or the larger sacred board that lives in the same family of restricted things. There is a period of separation, secrecy, and transformation on the ground. And there is a rule of exclusion: women and children hear the roar, see the stars, and are told what those sounds mean from outside the men’s side of the camp.

Australia alone shows that the Pleiades and the secret sound-maker belong together inside an initiation religion. The sisters summon the rite, the pursuer keeps pressure on them in the sky, the hidden instrument voices the male side of the mystery, and the novice is remade between them.

Across Australia, the Seven Sisters did not merely mark the initiation season; they called novices into ceremony and watched over their transformation.