Skyculture is a slow, two-year project to document how eleven human cultures have looked up at the same night sky and seen entirely different worlds.
The same cluster of stars 444 light-years away is Matariki to the Māori, the Pleiades to the Greeks, Subaru to the Japanese, Krittika in the Vedic tradition, and a hen with her chickens in medieval Europe. The lights are identical. The meaning is not.
This site is an attempt to hold all of those meanings in one place, and to do so with the care they deserve — beautifully designed, properly sourced, citing the scholars and traditions they come from rather than substituting for them.
Eleven cultures, each given a deep section: Māori, Greek, Egyptian, Polynesian, Aboriginal Australian, Inca, Chinese, Norse, Vedic, Arabic, and Mesopotamian. Where traditions are living, they are treated as living — not as artefacts. Where Indigenous scholarship exists, it leads.
Alongside the cultures, a second axis: pages that follow a single sky object — the Pleiades, Orion, the Milky Way, Sirius — across cultures, showing how the same lights become entirely different stories depending on who is looking.
Slowly. One piece every ten to fourteen days. The Māori section comes first — Matariki is the obvious starting point, and one of the richest living traditions. Greek and Egyptian follow. The remaining cultures arrive over the next two years.
If you’d like to know when new pieces go up, the newsletter — Risings — goes out once a month, on the new moon. Twelve letters a year.