2. In my imagination I tend to connect the Pleiades with the head of Medusa, as if it was her head which generated the swarm of stars. We should remember from Manuscript E how a swarm of flies went up into the sky from the head of the King: ... When all had left, when all the brothers were asleep, Tuu Maheke came and cut off the head of Hotu A Matua. Then he covered everything with soil. He hid (the head), took it, and went up. When he was inland, he put (the head) down at Te Avaava Maea. Another day dawned, and the men saw a dense swarm of flies pour forth and spread out like a whirlwind (ure tiatia moana) until it disappeared into the sky ... In Hevelius' picture (the red lines are mine) there seems to be hint of an association between the Medusa head and the Fly constellation (her hair flows towards the Fly and by prolonging the line from her left eye to her nose the Fly will be reached):
However, the head of Andromeda is an alternative origin for the Pleiades:
The 'Queen' (Moon) requires counting in pairs - there are 2 fortnights in a month and there are 2 months necessary to reach a whole number (59). Therefore the Sun King has a pair of wives, both a 'winter maid' and a 'summer maid'. When the 'winter maid' is finished, the turn has come to the 'summer maid', i.e. presumably Andromeda. The first sign in the sky of the new 'year' (summer north of the equator) is the heliacal rising of the Pleiades and it could be originating from the head of Andromeda. I therefore guess it is not the Pleiades but Musca which derives from the head of the 'winter maid' (Medusa):
Musca ought to be the Lord of the Flies (Beelzebub):
I think we now are equipped as good as we can be for reading about the Perseus myth in The White Goddess: "The myth is that Perseus was sent to cut off the head of the snaky-locked Gorgon Medusa, a rival of the Goddess Athene, whose baleful look turned men into stone, and that he could not accomplish the task until he had gone to the three Graeae, 'Grey Ones', the three old sisters of the Gorgons who had only one eye and one tooth between them, and by stealing eye and tooth had blackmailed them into telling him where the grove of the Three Nymphs was to be found. From the Three Nymphs he then obtained winged sandals like those of Hermes, a bag to put the Gorgon's head into, and a helmet of invisibility. Hermes also kindly gave him a sickle; and Athene gave him a mirror and showed him a picture of Medusa so that he would recognize her. He threw the tooth of the Three Grey Ones, and some say the eye also, into Lake Triton, to break their power, and flew on to Tartessus where the Gorgons lived in a grove on the borders of the ocean; there he cut off the sleeping Medusa's head with the sickle, first looking into the mirror so that the petrifying charm should be broken, thrust the head into his bag, and flew home pursued by other Gorgons." Once Lake Triton was a large sweet water lake south of Carthago. Tartessos was a great harbour on the Iberian Peninsula and - some say - this was Atlantis (outside the Pillars of Hercules = the promontories flanking the entrance to the Gibraltar Strait):
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