By Jovan Stipić

Is there anything in this world that makes us feel as small as looking up at the night sky? Anything as romantic and as hopeful? And is there anything that shines brighter in the night sky but the stars of the Milky Way?

Most don't look at it as mysterious, and why should they? Astrology courses at school teach us that it's a collection of stars, planets, satellites, and whatnot. But that is not the answer our ancestors had. No, most cultures had a magical and sometimes even romantic view of the Milky Way. We'll explore a few today. And who knows, you might learn something or even look up at the night sky with new eyes.

According to Navajo mythology,

when the world was created, the people gathered around the fire god to pick stars out of a bag and meticulously place them in the sky according to a seasonal pattern. But the mischievous Loki, a Coyote deity, grew annoyed at the slowness of their process and exasperatedly threw the bag of unplaced stars up over his head into the sky. This scattering formed the Milky Way and stars that cannot be named because they were not properly placed. That mischievous Coyote deity might also be familiar to those who know the tale of how the moon came to be. But that is a story for a different time.

According to Eastern Asian mythology, 

when the king of the sky was creating the heavens, he asked his daughter, the seventh princess of heaven, to help him by weaving the clouds and mist. It was a tiresome job. Eventually, the princess grew weary, so her father told her to take a break to play among the stars. She went to bathe in the Milky Way, a small stream in the heavens, and met a handsome herd-boy, as you do when bathing in the stars. They lost track of time together, and when she finally returned to her father, he was furious. To prevent her from revisiting the herd-boy, he poured thousands of stars into the Milky Way so that it turned from a small stream into an impassable river. The princess became so heartbroken that it is said most stars in the sky dimmed, and some were even snuffed out forever. Her father resolved to allow her to visit the herd-boy once a year by sending a flock of magpies to form a bridge over the Milky Way.

Fans of the Marvel movies,

especially Thor, are probably familiar with the Bifrost. Well, not only did it exist in Norse mythology, but it also represented the Milky Way. As described in the Poetic and the Prose Edda, it is a mystical bridge between worlds, connecting Asgard's heavenly realm to Midgar's earthly realm.

Irish and Celtic Mythology

has several names and legends associated with the Milky Way.

One of the most famous is the tale of Deirdre, the adoptive daughter of King Conchobar mac Nessa in the Ulster Cycle of Irish Mythology. His daughter Deirdre dreamed that she would love a man with skin as white as snow, hair as black as a raven, and cheeks as red as blood. If you find that description familiar, it is because Snow White was based on her dream. In the legend, that man turned out to be Naoise, a warrior and singer in her father's court. After the two fell in love, they fled from Ireland with the help of Naoise's two brothers, fearing her adoptive father's wrath, and escaped to Scotland.

Eventually, Conchobar had Naoise and his brothers killed. However, on their return home Deirdre threw herself from the horse she was riding, killing herself on the spot. Angered, Conchobar buried them separately, but a tree grew from each grave, and the branches entwined. Again, Conchobar had them dug up and buried on opposite sides of a lake; but then, a great cluster of stars appeared across the sky, connecting the two graves.

Of course, not all stories connected to the Milky Way are as intricate as those of the Navajo, the Chinese, Norse or Irish.

Most are short explanations without much of a narrative behind them. For example, African Bushmen believed the Milky Way was made of campfire ashes, Polynesians believed it was a long, blue shark that ate clouds, and the Greeks believed it was the scorched path along which the Sun once moved across the sky.

Yet even those speak loudly of the imagination and the beliefs that once ruled the world. Where every force and law of nature had to be explained either by something mystical, imaginative, or sometimes even romantic, but always and without fault, they had to be enchanting.