Star Cultures

What is a Star Culture?

Various cultures from around the globe have developed their own stories relating to the stars in the night sky, or have attributed existing stories to stellar figures. Various sets of stars have been given various names because some people decided they were important enough to warrant one. Over time, these names and stories evolved, the figures in the sky evolving along with them, morphing to suit contemporary thought. Sometimes, names and stories from certain cultures were adopted by others, their original meaning corrupted or maintained to suit their new cultural context.

The phenomenon of the morphing of language and stories and of cultural transmission relating to the stars is widely attested across various human cultures. Common themes even seem to pervade thoughout, such as the Lunar Mansions of China, India, Coptic Egypt, Persia, and Arabia. To summarise this phenomenon, we call the collected terms and stories for figures in the sky attributable to a certain cultural context a star culture.

This page is to serve as a repository for the various star cultures throughout the world. Here you can find a list of them, ordered by the time they were inputted into the site, as for the most part they were added batch-style. From here, please investigate a star culture, its names and their etymologies, its history, its stellar figures, and the various stories told to describe those figures.