SQL starts with the result you want — we SELECT what we want and then declare how to source it. In Cypher, the START clause is quite a different concept which specifies starting points in the graph from which the query will execute.

From a SQL point of view, the identifiers in START are like table names that point to a set of nodes or relationships. The set can be listed literally, come via parameters, or as I show in the following example, be defined by an index look-up.

So in fact rather than being SELECT-like, the START clause is somewhere between the FROM and the WHERE clause in SQL.

SQL Query. 

SELECT *
FROM "Person"
WHERE name = 'Anakin'

Cypher Query. 

START person=node:Person(name = 'Anakin')
RETURN person

Cypher allows multiple starting points. This should not be strange from a SQL perspective — every table in the FROM clause is another starting point.