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Orion - Myth and Science - Part 1
Observing >
The winter skies are finally making their evening encore performances after their summer dormancy. And perhaps there is no constellation more recognizable among the lot than the Great Hunter, Orion.
Today we'll look at that part of the sky through our poetic, myth-loving spectacles. When we get together next time we'll analyze the great stars and nebulae through our goggles of science.
Orion is by far one of the most readily identifiable plots of the winter heavens, rising now in the eastern skies in the early evening. Its great quadrangle of stars, Orion's body, bisected by the bright triad of stars, his belt, is a story waiting to happen. And all over the globe there is no shortage of sagas.
The traditional western stories from the Greeks involve, of course, Orion the Hunter. And although there is just one hero of the constellation there are many stories that got him there.
Orion, by all accounts, was one big, handsome guy. His birth certificate shows that he is the son of Neptune and the nymph Euryale. At least that's how one of the stories of his genesis goes. And his foremost skill, the one he is immortalized for and the one that could get him in trouble, was hunting.
On one of his violent exploits he found himself on a stopover in Crete where he met Diana, the goddess of the Moon, who herself was a gung-ho hunter.
But, Apollo, the brother of Diana, knew the reputation of Orion as a womanizer and was not about to let his sister become Orion's latest conquest.
So the sly Apollo passed the word to Mother Earth that Orion had been bragging about being able to put down any animal on Earth.
This didn't sit well with Mom. In one version of his demise she produces a mighty scorpion, Scorpius, who does Orion in.
As per the dismal Diana's request, the gods allowed her friend to be immortalized in the heavens. With his dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, by his side, he stands there on the great river Eridanus. And to keep him from dropping off in boredom, he is placed face to face with the Great Bull, Taurus. When he is finally going to get around to slaying the Bull is anyone's guess.
For the record, Scorpius got a place in the sky as well, opposite Orion, as a warning to future Orions not to get too cocky.
But the stories don't end with the Greeks. Let's see what others have to say about that piece of cosmic real estate.
Another great culture, the Egyptians, placed Osiris there. He was the God of Light to the ancient Nile-dwellers. His naughty brother, Set, the God of Darkness, tricked Osiris into getting into a coffin-like box. He should have seen it coming. Alas! Set nailed the box shut and Osiris sufficated, shuffling off his immortal coil.
Even though Isis, his wife, found out about it, it was too late. Before anyone could help, Set cut Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them all about.
Isis gathered all the pieces together in a story the details of which are too disturbing even for Cold Case Files. Suffice it to say that Osiris' reconstructed remains rose up into the heavens.
Julius Staal's The New Patterns in the Sky gives us a multicultural tour of other "Orions" throughout the world.
In Peru, the Chimu Indians see the central star of Orion's Belt as a criminal, held there on either side by stars called Pata. The four stars that make up Orion's body are vultures waiting to consume said bad man. It was a starry reminder not to misbehave.
The Bororo Indians of Brazil fear and revere the terrifying cayman, a crocodile-like critter and they honor the leviathan in their skies. Its body is our Orion, the tail extending way north to Auriga and the head down into Lepus. It is a magnificently big constellation by any standards.
It doesn't stop there. Orion, being in that particular part of the starry dome above, can be seen by people in both hemispheres. The Hindus, the Chinese, the Dayak of Borneo, peoples of the Marshall Islands, the Maori of New Zealand all have myths centered on the great hourglass.
Moreover, Greek and Roman poets have honored it, and it is mentioned in the Bible, as well.
A fun exercise for school - public, private, or homeschool - is to assign the students the task of thinking up their own myth involving those seven great stars. It gives the kids a chance to use their imaginations and to write and draw, arts we are quickly losing.
Next time: The science behind what is going on up there, and why we are happy to see it all from a great distance.
Posted by Mark Ritter at 2006.12.12 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
