Two bright stars on opposite banks of the Milky Way — a weaver and a herdsman held apart, permitted to cross to one another only one night in the year. This is how one witness accounts for the origin of particular stars, and the served telling is Chinese, drawn from Myths & Legends of China (published 1922). It names the pair Aquila and Vega, "the Herdsman and the Weaver-girl." She is "the daughter of the Sun-god," so bound to her loom that her father marries her off across "the Silver Stream of Heaven" — the Milky Way — hoping to lighten her days.

Marriage undoes her industry instead: she forsakes her loom and needle for idleness, and the angry Sun-king banishes her husband to the far shore, decreeing that the two "meet only once a year," on "the seventh night of the seventh month." To carry her over, "the Sun-king called myriads of magpies," who flock together into a living bridge of wings. Her one fear is rain, for the River of Heaven brims so full that a single extra drop would sweep the bird-bridge away; but when the night holds clear she crosses and is "in the arms of her husband", and does so once every year.

The same chapter shows this is no lone case: a prince crucified by a tyrant's concubine is later "canonized by Chiang Tzu-ya" and set as ruler of the "constellation Tzu-wei of the North Polar heavens" — the north circumpolar stars — a particular light made from a particular man. For this address, though, only the Chinese witness is served; a German handbook of star-myths from 1925 and a scholar's commentary on Ovid wait unread. What makes a people look up at a fixed point of light and see someone with a story worth keeping?