IsiLimela
From All Skies Encyclopaedia
Authors: ASE Tech Team
isiLimela is a constellation of Xhosa and Zulu for Pleiades.
Etymology and History
The first sighting of “isiLimela” indicated the start of the Xhosa digging or planting season. It is also said that the month of the Digging Stars symbolised new life in a man for the coming-out ceremony of the Abakwetha circumcision school and it has always been a custom for Xhosa men to count their years of manhood from this time.
The Pleiades is a well-known cluster of stars, and normally six or seven bright ones can be seen. Many of the Southern African groups believe that when they first see the Pleiades in the early morning (August or early September), that the start of the planting season has come.[1]
Mythology
Weblinks
Reference
- ↑ Lock, Suki (online). Xhosa and Zulu sky culture in Stellarium, https://github.com/stellarium/stellarium , printed in Hoffmann and Wolfschmidt (eds., 2022), Astronomy in Culture --Cultures of Astronomy. Astronomie in der Kultur--Kulturen der Astronomie.: Featuring the Proceedings of the Splinter Meeting at the Annual Conference of the Astronomische Gesselschafb Sept. 14-16, 2021, tredition, Ahrensburg (Germany): 735-737.
