Orion

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Orion is the giant hunter of Greek myth, remembered chiefly as the brilliant constellation that carries his name across the winter sky. The figure and the star-pattern are bound together so tightly that the ancient sources rarely keep them apart: the man is a story told about the stars, and the stars are the place the story ends.

The myths about him do not agree, which is itself a sign of his age. He is born in Boeotia, a hunter of enormous strength and beauty; in one strand he pursues the Pleiades and is set chasing them forever; in another he boasts that he can kill any beast on earth, and the offended Earth sends a scorpion that stings him dead — which is why, the Greeks said, Orion and the constellation Scorpius are never seen in the sky at once, the hunter setting as his killer rises. He is variously the lover, the quarry, or the victim of Artemis, who in several versions causes or mourns his death. After dying he is placed among the stars, his hunting dog Sirius at his heel. The earliest mentions are already in Homer and Hesiod, where his rising and setting mark the turning of the agricultural year; the named myths were gathered and elaborated by later authors, and the variants were old before they were written down.

The same band of stars carried other meanings elsewhere. In Egypt the constellation was called Sah, and from the Pyramid Texts onward it was identified with Osiris, the murdered and risen god of the dead — so that the king, ascending after death, was said to join Osiris in the southern sky. Egyptologists treat this identification as securely attested in the texts; how far it shaped, say, the alignment of monuments is debated and often overstated. The constellation also figures in Mesopotamian star-lists, where it bears its own names and associations, evidence that several cultures fixed on the same conspicuous stars and read into them quite different gods.

What survives, then, is less a single character than a knot of traditions tied to one unmistakable arrangement of light — three stars in a row beneath two bright shoulders. The Greeks gave it a hunter and a death; the Egyptians gave it a god who had also died and returned. The figure outlasted the religions that named it: long after the cults were gone, the constellation kept the hunter’s name, and keeps it still.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (1895)

→ Related: Isis · Horus · Seth · Mesopotamia · Artemis