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Every culture that ever looked up on a clear, dark night saw the same pale band across the sky. What they named it splits, almost everywhere, into the same two ideas.

A Road Twice, a River Twice

Woodland peoples of eastern North America read it as the Path of Souls, the road the dead walk to reach the realm of the ancestors. Medieval England read the very same band as Watling Street, an actual Roman road laid across the sky. Neither culture could have known what the other called it, and both reached for a road.

China calls it the Silver River, across which the Weaver Girl and the Herdboy are allowed to meet once a year. In the Andes it is Mayu, the river, whose dark patches are the animals of the Andean sky and whose waters return to earth as rain. Two more cultures, no contact between them, and both reached for a river.

And Still More Names

Maori tradition calls it Te Ika Roa, the long fish stretched across the night, and Greek and Roman tradition made it the milk spilled from the breast of Hera, which is where its English name comes from. In the atlas as it stands today, the Milky Way carries more separately recorded readings from named traditions than any other object in the sky, which says at least as much about how often people have looked up and reached for a story as it does about the band of stars itself.

Where To Read More

• Milky WayShared SkyThe band of stars itself, and where every reading on this page is recorded
• HeraGreek DeitiesThe Greek goddess whose spilled milk gives the Milky Way its English name