Skywatcher's Companion: Constellations and Their Mythology

Introduction

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 sky’s billions of stars seem to make—shapes that creative minds could visualize by imagining lines connecting various stars. The shapes they imagined were often relevant to their own culture: Canada’s Inuit people, for example, saw a particular group of stars as a caribou.

Each culture’s 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 culture’s environment—the harsh, cold surroundings of Canada’s 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 gods—for 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