Origin of Name
According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the "Seven Stars" can be a reference to the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus, (also known as the Seven Sisters, named by the Greeks for the seven daughters of Atlas); the seven moving heavenly bodies known to the ancients: the sun, the moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; or the constellation Ursa Major, "the Plough", important for its symbolism in a rural arable area, and for indicating the direction North. "The Plough" is also a common pub name.
The reference to "seven stars in the sky" in the famous Green Grow the Rushes O! Teaching Song or Dilly Song gives further, if mystical, insights. The Seven Stars could be the Seven Stars referred to in Revelations as representing the seven angels of the Seven_churches_of_Asia; or the Pleiades, or Ursa Major. The song is replete with Christian and Pre-Christian symbolism, and dates to medieval times, if not earlier. Shakespeare refers to the "seven stars" in King_Lear Act 1, v
Read more about this topic: The Seven Stars Inn
Famous quotes containing the words origin of and/or origin:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)