Stan Shadick - Skywatchers Companion: Constellations and Their Mythology

Copyright 2007 Stan Shadick/Heritage House

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Originally published by Heritage House Publishing in 2007
in paperback with ISBN 978-1-894974-36-3.

This electronic edition was released in 2011.

e-pub ISBN: 978-1-926613-27-7

e-pdf ISBN: 978-1-926613-62-8

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

Sky maps by Stan Shadick
Constellation illustrations by Darlene Nickull
Photographs of Dumbbell Nebula and the Great Orion Nebula by Thomas Tuchan/iStockphoto

Heritage House acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), Canada Council for the Arts and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

www.heritagehouse.ca

The night sky is the biggest movie screen in the universe. Over the last 5,000 years, people from many different societies have been inspired to create stories about the formations that the skys billions of stars seem to makeshapes that creative minds could visualize by imagining lines connecting various stars. The shapes they imagined were often relevant to their own culture: Canadas Inuit people, for example, saw a particular group of stars as a caribou.

Each cultures stories, or myths, are known collectively as a mythology. They were created to explain such mysteries of the natural world as why storms occur, why the seasons change and why crows do not sing like other birds. Myths linked to stars and to groups of stars (called constellations) give us insights into how ancient people tried to make sense of the world they lived in and the sky above it.

Many constellations have been recognized for thousands of years. Some have fascinating names that help explain many of the words and sayings we hear today. Many are names of gods, legendary heroes or animal figures believed to be roaming the universe. Myths from different cultures are often similar but with different settings, or elements, determined largely by a cultures environmentthe harsh, cold surroundings of Canadas Inuit, for example, or the sea-based world of people like the Phoenicians, who conducted their trade on the Mediterranean Sea. Learning how the constellations and the stars got their names is a good introduction to both astronomy and mythology.

About Mythologies

Among the first people to create mythologies were those in the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia, located roughly where the country of Iraq is today. As these kingdoms grew and prospered, mythological beliefs came to be tied to the heavens above. Star formations were attributed to the godsfor if not the work of the greatest gods, what could these jewel-like objects, so beautiful and constantly changing, possibly be?and often represented legendary heroes on Earth who had somehow earned an eternal place in the night sky. Storytellers made up new tales to explain how the lives and actions of those gods influenced the lives of humans.

Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome

Over time, the myths surrounding constellations were passed on to succeeding civilizations. The Mesopotamians myths were later absorbed by the trade-oriented Phoenicians, who lived on the Mediterranean coasts of modern-day Lebanon and Syria and established trade routes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. They in turn greatly influenced their Greek neighbours.

The Greeks had a tremendously complex and interconnected pantheon (collection) of gods and goddesses, who ruled the world from atop Mount Olympus. During the Roman Empires 500-year reign (circa 27 BC to AD 476), its emperors adopted the Greeks pantheon, and its scribes (writers) preserved the Greek stories, gods and heroes, simply changing their names into Latin ones.

It was the ancient Greeks and Romans who created many of the most imaginative constellations, visualizing lines connecting individual stars to create the shapes of celestial beings and other creatures. They then made up stories for each constellation that explained how and why they came to have their positions in the sky.

The table on the opposite page shows some of the gods and heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and their areas of influence. Because many individual stars are named with letters from the Greek alphabet, weve reproduced that alphabet here; weve also included a timeline of ancient civilizations to give you a better idea of when some of the myths talked about in this book were created.

Greek Alphabet

Viewing the Stars

Gazing into the heavens from a flat rural location on a moonless night might be the perfect way to see thousands of stars in one skywatching session, but you can enjoy viewing the stars anywhere as long as you find a place where most of the surrounding light is reduced or eliminated from your line of vision. Using a pair of binoculars will help to reduce lightand help you see better, of course!

It is important to remember that if you were to look at the sky night after night from the same position, what you would see would always be different, because of Earths revolution around the Sun. For this reason, there are 12 sky charts in this book, one for every month. (They show the skies in 2008; to see accurate positions of stars and planets in a specific month and year, refer to the current edition of Skywatchers calendar.) Also included are full-sky maps, which show what you can see if you lie flat on your back and stare straight up at the sky (they, too, show the sky in 2008).

In the northern hemisphere we will see the same stars, even if we are in different parts of the world, as long as we are at the same general latitude, or distance from the equator. (We would see different constellations in the southern hemispherein South America or Australia, for example.) The charts in this book show areas of the sky seen mainly in North America and Europe and parts of Asia, including Japan. Figure 1 indicates the viewing area. Now lets discover some of the characters and myths that make up our starry, starry nights.