count, for a change? What could it mean, when a hero was on his way slightly more than two years, 'returning' at intervals, 'falling into space,' coming off the 'right' route? There remained, indeed, not many possible solutions: it had to be planets (in the particular case of Aukele-nui-a-iku, Mars). If so, planets had to be constitutive members of every mythical personnel; the Polynesians did not invent this trait by themselves."
von Dechend 1969:ix,x

Now the powers of the Abyss are beginning to rise, the world is coming apart. At this point Heimdal comes to the fore. He is the Warner of Asgard, the guardian of the Bridge between heaven and earth, the "Whitest of the Aesir," but his role, his freedom of action is severly limited. He has many gifts--he can hear grass grow, he can see a hundred miles away--but these powers seem to remain ineffectual. He owns the Gjallarhorn, the great battle horn of the gods; he is the only one able to sound it, but he will blow it only once, when he summons the gods and heroes of Asgard to their last fight.

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969: 156

But the character of Heimdal raises a number of sharp questions. He has appeared upon the scene as "the son of nine mothers"; to be the son of several mothers is a rare distinction even in mythology, and one which Heimdal shares only with Agni in the Rigveda, and with Agni's son Skanda in the Mahabbarata. Skanda (literally "the jumping one" or "the hopping one") is the planet Mars, also called Kartikeya, inasmuch as he was borne by the Krittika, the Pleiades. . . .

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:157

More understandable also becomes another epithet of Heimdal, namely Vindler, of which Rydberg states (p.595): "The name is a subform of vindill and comes from vinda, to twist or turn, wind, to turn anything around rapidly. As the epithet 'the turner' is given to that god who brought friction-fire (bore-fire) to man, and who is himself the personification of this fire, then it must be synonymous with 'the borer.'"

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:159

Now Susanowo was banished from the sky for having thrown the hind part of his backward-flayed piebald stallion in the weaving hall of his sister Amaterasu. These sudden discourteous gestures seem to be part of the code. Enkidu had thus thrown the hind quarter of the Bull from Heaven in the face of Ishtar...

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:159

Lucian of Samosata, that most delightful writer of antiquity, the inventor of modern "science fiction," who knew how to be light and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity, and was fully aware of the "ancient treasure," remarked once that the ludicrous story of Hephaistos the Lame surprising his wife Aphrodite in bed with Mars, and pinning down the couple with a net to exhibit their shame to the other gods, was not an idle fancy, but must have referred to a conjunction of Mars and Venus, and it is fair to add, a conjunction in the Pleiades.

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:177

As the father feared, Phaethon was incapable of managing the horses and came off the proper path; Ovid has it that the boy dropped the reins at the sight of Scorpius. . . And Nonnos states (38.35off.): "There was tumult in the sky shaking the joints of the immovable univers; the very axle bent which runs through the middle of the revolving heavens.. Libyan Atlas could hardly support the self-rolling firmament of stars, as he rested on his knees with bowed back under this greater burden."

Zeus has to intervene and hurls his thunderbolt at the boy. Phaethon falls into the river Eridanus where, according to Apollonios Rhodios, the stench of his half-burned corpse made the Argonauts sick for several days when they came upon it in their travels. (4.619-23).

de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:251-252

The Fiote of the African Loango Coast, already mentioned, say: "The Star Way [Galaxy] is the road for a funeral procession of a huge star which, once, shone brighter from the sky than the sun."
de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:253

Our own era, the Age of Pisces, started with a great conjunction in Pisces, in the year 6 B.C.
de Santillana and von Dechend 1969:268

There are, indeed, too many traditions connecting Ursa and the Pleiades with this or that kind of catastrophe to be overlooked. Among the many we mention only one example from later Jewish legends, some lines taken out of a most fanciful description of Noah's flood, quoted by Frazer: (Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918), vol. 1, pp.143f.)

Now the deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades; and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get them till after the Last Day.

Taken from Hebrew Myths, Graves and Patai.