The Seven Sisters are the Pleiades, and in Aboriginal Australian tradition they are ancestral women who travelled the continent and were pursued by a hunter, a story that every one of Australia's several hundred language groups tells in some form. In this 4biddenknowledge Podcast episode Billy Carson talks with the researchers Steven and Evan Strong and with Trudy, an Aboriginal elder from the east coast, who says her own family descends from the hunter who met the sisters at a water ceremony and that the elders' test of any story is simple: "if they don't connect it to the stars, walk away." Anthropologists agree that the Seven Sisters songline is ancient and continent-wide; they do not accept the Strongs' Out-of-Australia theory or the Egyptian reading of the Gosford Glyphs, and this article gives both positions.
The YouTube cut runs seventeen minutes and ends with a pointer to the full episode on 4BK TV, so what follows draws on what is said in the clip and supplies the documented background around it.
Who are the guests, and how did Carson meet them?
Carson explains that shortly before the pandemic he flew to Australia to meet Steven and Evan Strong, father and son authors of a series of books on Aboriginal origins, who put him through a ritual before taking him into the bush: smoking with sacred branches, prayer with an old tree, and a call to the animals whose answer was the signal to proceed. They walked him to the Gosford Glyphs at Kariong, north of Sydney, camped on the rock faces, and along the way rescued two lost hikers who recognized him and asked for a selfie. He brings the Strongs on, he says, partly so viewers hear the account from someone other than him, and brings Trudy on so that an Aboriginal voice is in the room rather than described.
What is the Seven Sisters story Trudy tells?
Trudy's family totem and name descend from a man she calls Gurunbill, who was hunting on the east coast when he came upon the seven sisters performing a sacred water ceremony at a time when drinking water was scarce. He had never seen anyone so beautiful, but he knew not to approach while they were in ceremony, and he knew to fear the digging sticks they carried, tipped with powerful crystals. When the sisters rested at a waterhole and set the sticks down, he seized the two youngest. Their answer, which she says her family has never forgotten, was: "You can't marry us. We're your sisters. Blood of blood."
The chase that followed, in her telling, brought on the first winter. The hunter hid the two girls among three camps; the remaining sisters, unwilling to kill him, sang the cold down to flush him out, which is why the Pleiades are the winter stars in her language. They then travelled east to bring back the sun and warm the earth, retrieved the girls, and when the hunter stubbornly took the last sister she too went to join them in the sky. For her family the story carried a law: men must choose their wives wisely. Carson's response is that the story is "a triple entendre," at once about the sky, about civilization and about personal conduct, which is how an oral tradition can carry so much in so little.
Why does every Aboriginal nation know this story?
Steven Strong makes the point that Australia has around five hundred tribal groups, each with stories tied to its own country, but that the Seven Sisters is the one narrative every group knows "back to front," with the plot nearly the same from coast to coast, "because it's the beginning." Trudy adds that the songline starts in Western Australia, where the land is older and where the first version has seven hunters showing the sisters the country, and ends on the east coast; she is working to collect every clan's section into one book. Evan Strong notes that the version recorded by early European writers is the children's version, and that as a person is initiated, more is added.
This matches the scholarly record. The Seven Sisters songlines cross the Western Desert, the Pilbara, the Kimberley and the eastern states, and the 2017 National Museum of Australia exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters was built around them. In a 2021 paper the astronomers Ray and Barnaby Norris argued that the story, which in Australia and in Greek myth alike involves a lost seventh sister, may record a time when the star Pleione was far enough from Atlas to be seen separately, which would date the core of the tale to perhaps 100,000 years ago. Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years by the dating at Madjedbebe, so an origin that old is at least possible.
What does Carson add about the Pleiades across cultures?
Carson lists the cultures that name the cluster the Seven Sisters: Egypt, Greece, the Hopi and Lakota, and Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians called it MUL.MUL, "the stars." His puzzle is that only six are visible to the naked eye, because, he says, one has burned down to a white dwarf, so either the ancients imagined a seventh or the story is old enough to remember when it could be seen.
MUL.MUL is correct, and the lost-Pleiad motif is documented from Greece to Japan and North America. The missing sister is not a white dwarf, though; the Pleiades are a young cluster of hot blue stars about a hundred million years old, far too young for any member to have died. The usual astronomical explanations are the variability of Pleione and the close pairing of Pleione with Atlas, which the Norris paper developed into its dating argument.
What is the Out-of-Australia theory?
Steven Strong gives the thesis in a sentence: the elders say "we've never left this land," and they say they were the first people, who went out and gave stories to everyone else. He reports elders telling him that the Bible's stories came from Australia, including forty years of wandering in a desert, since "there isn't a desert that big in the Middle East, but there is in Australia," and he says the method of the books is to walk the country with elders and report what they are shown without adding to it.
Mainstream science places the origin of Homo sapiens in Africa around 300,000 years ago, with the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians leaving Africa in the dispersal of roughly 70,000 years ago and reaching Sahul by about 65,000 years ago; the 2016 whole-genome study by Malaspinas and colleagues found Aboriginal Australians to be among the oldest continuous populations outside Africa, which is a different claim from an Australian origin for everyone else. Trudy's remark that Western Australia is older than the east coast is geologically sound, since the Pilbara and Yilgarn cratons hold rocks older than 3.5 billion years, but geological age and human origins are separate questions.
What are the Gosford Glyphs?
The site Carson visited is a sandstone cleft in Brisbane Water National Park with roughly three hundred carvings that resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs, including cartouches and a figure some read as Anubis. The Strongs regard them as evidence of ancient contact, and Carson calls the place "one of the most amazing on the face of this earth." The New South Wales parks service and Egyptologists who have examined the glyphs date them to the twentieth century, pointing to a mix of signs from different periods, misdrawn forms, fresh tool marks and local accounts of students carving there in the 1970s and 1980s. Local Darkinjung people regard the cleft as part of their own cultural landscape regardless of the carvings' age. The debate is live enough that the site remains a stop on Carson's Australia tours.
What do blood, water and the ancestors have to do with it?
In the clip's opening montage Trudy says that a single gram of blood holds "seven and a half thousand terabytes" of memory, that thousands of generations are recorded in blood and water, and that the sacred waters of the Seven Sisters story are "the water within you." She also says Lemuria had little free will and strict law, that the ancestors are coming back "as soon as we reach a certain vibration," and that her people live by the law of one, with the white cockatoo as the symbol of unity.
The data figure is in the right order of magnitude for DNA rather than blood: one gram of DNA can in principle store around 215 petabytes, and DNA does carry ancestral information in the literal sense that geneticists read population history from it. The idea that water stores memory has no experimental support. The Law of One is also the name of a channelled text from the 1980s; Trudy uses the phrase for an Aboriginal principle of kinship and unity, which is a separate tradition.
Where to watch the rest
The full conversation, including the Strongs' account of their fieldwork and more of Trudy's songline, is on 4BK TV; the YouTube clip ends with that pointer. Carson's own Pleiades thread, in which the Anunnaki story begins in that star system, is developed in the first episode of Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed, linked below.
Watch, read, listen
- Watch the clip:
- The full episode on 4BK TV: https://4biddenknowledge.ai/FourBKTV
- The 4biddenknowledge Podcast archive: https://4biddenknowledge.ai/Podcast
- Topic hubs: Anunnaki & Sumer and Consciousness
- Related reading: the Pleiades and the Pleiadians explained, the Kariong engravings near Gosford, Carson on the Pleiades, the Igigi and the cosmic wars, the Hopi blue and red kachina prophecy, the Law of One explained, the flood story across cultures, Australia's ancient geology and the pink diamonds and Billy Carson's tour dates, including Australia.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the Seven Sisters? The Pleiades star cluster, told in Aboriginal tradition as seven ancestral women pursued across the land by a hunter. Versions of the lost-sister story occur in Greek, Japanese and Native American traditions too.
Why can only six stars be seen? Six Pleiades are visible to most naked eyes. Astronomers attribute the "lost" seventh to the variable star Pleione and its closeness to Atlas, not to a dead star.
How old is the Aboriginal Seven Sisters story? It is told by every language group in Australia. One 2021 astronomical argument places its core as far back as 100,000 years; Aboriginal occupation of Australia is dated to at least 65,000 years.
What is the Out-of-Australia theory? The Strongs' claim, based on what elders told them, that Aboriginal people originated in Australia and carried culture to the rest of the world. Genetics and archaeology support an African origin and an arrival in Australia about 65,000 years ago.
Are the Gosford Glyphs real Egyptian hieroglyphs? Egyptologists and the state parks service date them to the twentieth century. The Strongs and Carson treat them as evidence of ancient contact.
Where can I watch the full episode? On 4BK TV; the YouTube upload is a seventeen-minute cut.
Sources mentioned
- Steven and Evan Strong, Out of Australia: Aborigines, the Dreamtime and the Dawn of the Human Race (2013) and related titles
- The Gosford Glyphs, Kariong, Brisbane Water National Park, New South Wales
- Ray P. Norris and Barnaby R. M. Norris, "Why Are There Seven Sisters?" (2021)
- National Museum of Australia, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (2017)
- Chris Clarkson and colleagues, "Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago," Nature (2017)
- Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas and colleagues, "A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia," Nature (2016)
- Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, "DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture," Science (2017)
- Mesopotamian star lists naming the Pleiades MUL.MUL
