Meamei- Aboriginal Australian GroupCollective"Seven Sisters"
Also known as: Mayi-Mayi
Description
Seven sisters whose bodies sparkled with icicles. Two were captured by the trickster Wurrunnah when he stole their yam sticks while they dug for ants, but they escaped by climbing a pine tree that stretched itself to the sky. All seven became the Pleiades, and when they shine bright in winter, frost covers the ground.
Mythology & Lore
The Ice Sisters
The Meamei were seven sisters in the Dreamtime of the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi peoples, young women with long hair falling to their waists and bodies that sparkled with icicles. They lived together, skilled in gathering food, until the trickster Wurrunnah stole two of their yam sticks while they dug for flying ants near their camp. When the two sisters went searching for their missing sticks, Wurrunnah sprang from hiding and seized them. He told them not to be afraid, that he wanted wives, and they must come quietly.
The captured sisters traveled with Wurrunnah but were wretched. Their bodies still glittered with ice, and when he tried to warm the icicles from them beside his fire, the ice only doused his flames. The two longed for their sisters and for the sky. When Wurrunnah sent them to chop pine bark, the opportunity came: the tree began to stretch upward, climbing higher and higher until its crown reached the sky where their five sisters waited. The two captives climbed free and joined them in the heavens. All seven Meamei became the Pleiades.
The Frost and the Laughing Star
When the Pleiades burn bright in the winter sky, frost covers the ground. In Kamilaroi tradition, the ice crystals on the ground at dawn are the cold that once glittered on the sisters' bodies, now settling on the earth below them. When the Pleiades disappear from the sky, the frost lifts and the warmer months begin.
A relation of the Meamei watched Wurrunnah's humiliation from above and laughed so hard at his discomfiture that she has been laughing ever since. She is Daendee Ghindamaylannahh, the laughing star, and her brightness in the pre-dawn sky is the sound of mockery that never stopped.