by Terry McCombs
Of the seven Pleiades — the daughters of the Titan Atlas who were placed among the stars — Electra is the one most often said to have hidden her face. In myth, she could not bear to watch the fall of Troy, a city whose kings were descended from her. In astronomy, she is sometimes identified as the "lost Pleiad," the one star in the constellation that is difficult to see with the naked eye. Her name, rooted in the Greek word for amber, passed through Latin into the vocabulary of modern physics: our word "electricity" traces directly to Electra. This profile, posted to soc.religion.paganism on March 30, 2008, as part of Terry McCombs's God of the Month Club series, untangles the several Electras of Greek tradition and traces the daughter of the Titans from her Pleiad origins to her unlikely afterlife atop a power company building in Birmingham, Alabama.
NAME: Electra, Eleckra, Atlantis (by Ovid), the Nephele (Cloud-Nymph), Ozomene. Meanings: amber, shining, bright.
AREA OF INFLUENCE/CONTROL: As the daughter of Titans — who were displaced by the Gods of Olympus — and in later ages called a nymph, Electra was not a goddess proper with an area of control or influence. Though in early times she was sometimes said to have something to do with family; was, along with her sisters and a number of other goddesses, nymphs, and women, a sometime Amazon Moon-Women companion of Artemis the Goddess of the Moon, the Hunt and Chastity; as well as one of the nurses of Bacchus. In later years she has been called by some a Goddess of Electricity due to her association with amber and through it static electricity, and because our word "electron" comes from her name.
This later designation is perhaps most notable in the 23-foot-tall, 4,000-pound gold-covered statue known as "Miss Electra" that stands atop the Birmingham, Alabama Power Company building.
SYMBOLS: Electrum, the naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver. Amber, which was regarded by the ancients as a solidified form of lightning. It should also be noted that it is because of her association with amber that this material is also associated with Taurus, due to the Pleiades being part of that constellation.
USUAL IMAGE: Most often depicted only with her sisters as a human-appearing woman in Greek dress.
HOLY DAYS: While neither she nor her sisters had a holiday per se, the rising of the Pleiades was a sign of summer and their setting a sign of winter, so this constellation was more honored than any other.
RELATIVES: Oceanus or Atlas (father). Tethys (mother). Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, Maia, Merope, Taygeta (sisters). Thaumas, "Wonder" (husband, a sea god). Gaia and Uranus (in-laws, to use the modern equivalent). The Harpies (daughters, bird-women who personified storm winds). Iris (daughter, goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods, depicted as a winged woman).
SYNODEITIES: Tien Mu (Chinese). Inazuma (Shinto, Japan).
Details
Yes, her name is Electra — but don't confuse her with the tragic, and very human, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, famed for her madness, and an opera by Strauss; or the Electra who was a daughter of King Oedipus, and who has a complex named after her by Sigmund Freud.
No — this Electra, our Electra, had the name first and long before either of those two Joanie-Come-Lately humans!
The daughter of Titans — the often monstrous deities before the coming of the Gods and Goddesses of Olympus — she and her sisters were never given the opportunity for full goddess status. However, they weren't without some notoriety: she and her six siblings were identified as the constellation known mostly today as the Pleiades (popularly called the Seven Sisters), much studied and turned into myth by ancient peoples around the world. To the Greeks, the stars of the Pleiades were the seven sisters:
- Alcyone or Halcyone — "the one who wards off storms and evil"
- Asterope or Sterope — "Sun-Face"
- Celaeno — "the Swarthy One"
- Maia — "the Great One, the Nurse, or Grandmother"
- Merope — "the Eloquent Bee-Eater"
- Taygete or Taygeta — "the Long-Necked"
- Electra — who in some accounts is "the lost Pleiad," represented by the star in the constellation not easily seen by the naked eye, due to her hiding her face from mortals on seeing the destruction of Troy.
If that is the case, I guess we're lucky she hasn't looked our way during the last century, or she might have turned into a black hole!
Colophon
Written by Terry McCombs and posted to soc.religion.paganism on March 30, 2008, as part of his long-running God of the Month Club series. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
McCombs ran the God of the Month Club in soc.religion.paganism from 2003 through at least 2009, producing cross-cultural profiles of deities from every major tradition. Electra, the Pleiad whose name gave us "electricity," appeared in March 2008 — spring, when the Pleiades were returning to the night sky.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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