Celaena is likely inspired by Greek Selene, the moon goddess, giving it a luminous and mythic feel.
Celaena has its feet planted in the oldest sky-stories humanity ever told. In Greek mythology, Celaeno (Κελαινώ) was one of the seven Pleiades, daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione, whose grief at the death of their sisters was said to have fixed them in the night sky forever. The name derives from the Greek *kelainós*, meaning dark or dusky — a fitting epithet for a star that ancient observers sometimes found difficult to locate within the cluster.
The same root appears in the Harpy Celaeno of the *Aeneid*, a creature associated with prophecy and the boundary between worlds. Astronomers formalized the name for the star Celaeno (16 Tauri) in the Pleiades cluster, giving the name a permanent cosmological address. This dual existence — mythological figure and charted celestial object — lends the name an unusual intellectual texture.
It belongs to both the humanities and the sciences in a way few names do. The name gained enormous contemporary momentum through Sarah J. Maas's *Throne of Glass* series (2012–2018), where Celaena Sardothien is introduced as a legendary assassin.
Maas's choice revived a name that had been dormant in popular usage for centuries, and readers around the world encountered it as something wholly new. In naming registries, small but measurable upticks in Celaena appear in the years following each book's release. Today it occupies a fascinating position: mythologically grounded, astronomically authenticated, and cinematically vivid — a name that rewards the curious.