7 May: The Greek goddess Maia

This month is sacred to the Greek goddess Maia. 10 things you might not know about her:

1. She is the eldest of the Pleiades, the seven nymphs which make up the star cluster, said to have been turned into doves and flew off into the heavens to get away from Orion. They were also called the Atlantides.
2. Maia is the daughter of Atlas and Pleione, who is an Oceanid – one of the three thousand daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys.
3. The name “Maia” translates to “nursing mother.”
4. Shy and reclusive, she preferred to live alone in a cave near the peak of Mount Kyllene.
5. Like all her sisters, though, she was very beautiful and couldn’t escape being noticed by Zeus. He visited her cave in the dead of night and they started an affair. The result of that affair was the god Hermes, which gave Maia a high status as the mother of an important god.
6. The Romans revered her as well as the Greeks. To them, she was more than the mother of Mercury (the Roman equivalent of Hermes) but also a personification of growth. Her name in the Roman world was thought to be related to the word maius, maior, meaning "larger/greater".
7. As well as being the mother of Hermes, she also adopted Arcas, another of Zeus’s sons by Callisto, after she was turned into a bear by Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera.
8. The playwright Aeschylus identified Maia with Gaia, the mother of the Earth. He would use the two names interchangeably and sometimes used “Gaia Maia,” which means “nursing mother of the earth.”
9. Maia’s symbols are braided and knotted items.
10. The star named for her is a blue white giant star in the constellation of Taurus, also known as 20 Tauri. Maia is the fourth-brightest star in the Pleiades open star cluster and can be seen with the naked eye. The distance to Maia (around 400 light years) has been measured, appropriately enough, by the Gaia spacecraft.

Character birthday

Femforcer, aka Naomi Slater. She is a martial arts master and a feminist. She was a teacher at a girls’ school for a while, but was suspended for pushing the feminist agenda too much. During her suspension, she applied for the Combat Team martial arts contest and won a place. She chose to join Team Gamma, because this team had the only female owner, Madeleine Earnshaw.