The Peleiades reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Peleiades

In ancient Greece, Peleiades ("doves") were the sacred women of Zeus and the Mother Goddess, Dione, at the Oracle at Dodona. Pindar made a reference to the Pleiades as the "peleiades" a flock of doves, but the connection seems witty and poetical, rather than mythic. The chariot of Aphrodite was drawn by a flock of doves, however.

A mythic element of a black dove that initiated the oracle at Dodona (q.v.), which Herodotus was told in the 4th century BCE may be an attempt to account for a folk etymology applied to the archaic name of the sacred women that no longer made sense. Was the pel- element in their name actually originally connected with "black" or "muddy" root elements in names like "Peleus" or "Pelops"?

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