The Big Dipper and the seven sages: the sky map of the seven nights

A map that really exists, above your head

The Big Dipper, called the Plough in Britain, is not a whole constellation: it is an asterism, the figure drawn by the seven brightest stars of Ursa Major. Three of them make the handle: Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth. Four make the bowl: Megrez, Phecda, Merak, Dubhe.

On the course page, each star sits in its true place, north at the top, with the number of its night. You move from the tip of the handle toward the bowl: night 1 lights Alkaid, night 7 lights Dubhe. A star lights up when the trial of its night is passed; between two lit stars, a thread is drawn. The full walkthrough is in how the seven nights work.

Tap a star on the map: the night it carries appears just below, with its title and what it teaches.

Seven names that come from Arabic

The seven names come from Arabic. Several describe a body, that of the Bear, whose tail is the handle of the Big Dipper: you can read a thigh in them, the loins, the root of a tail. Here they are in the order of the nights, as the map writes them.

• Night 1, Alkaid: “the leader”. It shines at the tip of the handle and leads the way.
• Night 2, Mizar: “the girdle”. At the bend of the handle, with a small companion pressed against it.
• Night 3, Alioth: the brightest of the seven. The origin of its name is debated; it is often traced back to the tail of the animal.
• Night 4, Megrez: “the root of the tail”. The faintest of the seven, and yet the one where the handle joins the bowl.
• Night 5, Phecda: “the thigh”. It holds the bottom of the bowl.
• Night 6, Merak: “the loins”. The first of the two pointers.
• Night 7, Dubhe: “the bear”. The second pointer, on the rim of the bowl: with it, the Big Dipper is complete.

Mizar and Alcor: the star that hides another

Look at Mizar, the second star of the handle. Right against it stands a smaller star, Alcor, visible to the naked eye. Telling one from the other long served as a test of eyesight: whoever saw two stars where others saw only one had a true eye.

The course kept the image for its second night, the night of the Ascendant and the houses. You train the same eye there: where you used to see only a planet in a sign, you learn to see the house it stands in as well.

The pointers and the Pole Star

Merak and Dubhe, the two stars that close the bowl on the side away from the handle, are the pointers. Draw a line from Merak to Dubhe, then extend it about five times the gap between them: you land on a lone star, roughly as bright as those of the Big Dipper. That is the Pole Star, Polaris.

It marks north, and the whole northern sky seems to turn around it as the night goes on. The Big Dipper itself circles it, now lying flat, now standing on its handle. Polaris alone does not move: it is the fixed point.

The map of the course keeps that gesture. The Pole Star is drawn at the end of the pointers’ line, closer than in the real sky so that it fits in the frame. The day your seven stars are lit, the bowl closes and the pointers’ line lights up in its turn, stretched toward it.

When the Pole Star lights up in its turn

On the map, the Pole Star is at first only a golden outline. It lights up for good the day the reward of the seven nights reaches your space: your tailored reading as a PDF, free for the first path you complete. How to receive it, for you or for someone close: the free PDF of the seven nights.

The Saptarishi: seven sages on the same stars

India looks at the same seven stars and sees seven sages: the Saptarishi. In the sixth century, the astronomer Varahamihira names them one by one in his Brihat Samhita, from east to west: Marichi, Vasishtha, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu. Marichi stands at the tip of the handle, where the West places Alkaid; Kratu closes the line, on Dubhe.

Vasishtha is not alone. Beside him stands Arundhati, his wife: she is Alcor, the small companion of Mizar. She is shown to newlyweds, these two stars that cross the night without ever parting.

As for the Pole Star, its name is Dhruva, “the immovable”: a child whose constancy was such that it made him the fixed point of the sky. The two traditions do not tell the same story, but they look up at the same point.

On the Vedic path, the stars carry the names of the sages

The course has two paths, and the map follows the one you choose. On the Vedic path, the seven stars carry the names of the sages: night 1 lights Marichi, night 2 Vasishtha, and so on up to Kratu, on night 7. The Pole Star, which the Western path writes Polaris, becomes Dhruva there.

Nothing else changes on the map: they are the same stars, in the same places, in the same order. Only the reading differs, as it does between the zodiac of the seasons and the zodiac of the stars that Vedic astrology follows. The few lines that open each lesson then speak of the sage of the night, and of what he lends it.

Why the course chose this sky

Because these seven stars carry, on their own, the whole idea of the course: one sky, read by two traditions. One sees a dipper and a bear in it, the other seven sages, and neither moves a single star. You learn one language of the sky, then you cross it with the other: that is the work of the seventh night.

There is a simpler reason still. The Big Dipper is not part of the zodiac: the planets never pass through it, they travel much further south, along the twelve signs. It is a landmark that does not get mixed up with what you are learning. It stays in the north while everything else moves on, like a map pinned to the wall.

And it is earned star by star, one night after another, which is the right measure for learning. Completed in seven days in a row, the seven nights turn its thread to gold. What each of them has taught you, you then find again on the wheel of your chart.

Finding the Big Dipper in the evening sky

From France, Britain or any similar northern latitude, the Big Dipper is visible all year, toward the north. You need a clear sky, a few minutes for your eyes to get used to the dark, and these six steps.

1. Go out after nightfall and move away from street lights if you can: Megrez, the faintest of the seven, is the better for it.
2. Turn to face north: that is the side of the sky the Big Dipper keeps to in every season.
3. Look for the shape of a large ladle: four stars in a slightly crooked square, the bowl, and three more curving away from it, the handle.
4. Do not be surprised to find it lying flat, standing on its handle or upside down, high or low: depending on the hour and the season, it turns around the Pole Star.
5. Spot the two stars that close the bowl, on the side away from the handle: Merak at the bottom, Dubhe on the rim. These are the pointers.
6. Extend their line from Merak through Dubhe and beyond, about five times the gap between them. The star you reach is Polaris: you are looking due north.

Once you have found the Big Dipper, go back to the handle and look for Alcor against Mizar, the second star from the tip. The planets never come this way: their positions of the moment are on today’s sky.