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This is the story of the lovers up in the night sky.
It is the story of the young Weaving Lady who wove all the garments for the gods in heaven and of the Shepherd boy of the Heavens who tended the gods’ flocks.
The Weaving lady lived and worked on the shore of the River of Heaven. She was the daughter of a god and she was young and pretty but she never left off her weaving to pursue the activities of the other young gods.
They would be dancing and singing, eating and laughing and reciting poetry and making love. But none of this mattered to the Weaving Lady at her loom for she had hear tell that if she left her loom she would suffer great sorrow in her life.
And so it was that the gods were all abundantly clothed in the newest cloth of her weaving, but she was dressed in rags and went with her hair dishevelled. Her father the God of Light grew ever more concerned but nothing he said could move her from her weaving.
Eventually he became impatient with her and demanded that she leave her loom and go join the young gods in their play. And so she was dressed in clothes worthy of her station as Goddess of Weaving and was bedecked in jewels. She befriended the other heavenly youths and danced and sang, and ate and drank, and recited poetry. And eventually she fell in love with the handsome young Shepherd Boy of Heaven.
Her father the God of Light was glad to have her married and happy at last.
However, she continued to dance and play with her new friends and her lover, and it went on until all the gods in Heaven had nothing but threadbare clothes to wear. Her father warned her sternly three times, and each time she only laughed and danced back out to enjoy herself with the Shepherd Boy.
After the third warning her father told her that he would seperate her forever from her husband. He commanded the birds in the sky to make a delicate bridge of their bodies in the air, across the River of Heaven, which is the Milky Way, and the Shepherd was made to walk over it to be banished on the far side of the river.
The Weaving lady was devastated. Finally she went back to her loom.
But her weaving was not the same as before. Now the sharp pain and dull misery of her loss coloured the cloth sometimes harshly and at other times drab. She begged her father to relent and bring back the Shepherd Boy. She promised that she would lead a moderate life from henceforth. Her father realised that she would not recover but he knew that as the spoken word of a god, the banishment could not be repealed. So he made it that on each of the seventh nights of the seventh moons, all the birds in the sky would again gather together in the air to make a bridge across the River of Heaven. Thus the Weaving Lady could cross and be reunited with her lover on the far side of the Milky Way.
THE END
Anyone who is familar with Graham Hancock’s ideas on the Osiris story, where Horus must travel across the Celestial River (and so on) will find the above story a little familiar!
©
Lynette F. Watters 1997-2005
To contact me, my email address is "lunetta777" followed by "@bigpond.com",
less the quotation marks (of course)
