Water carrier
Star maps show Aquarius as a young man pouring water from a jar, although Ovid, in his Fasti, says it is a mixture of water and nectar, the drink of the gods. The stream ends in the mouth of the Southern Fish, Piscis Austrinus. But who is Aquarius? The most popular identification is that he is Ganymede or Ganymedes, said to have been the most beautiful boy alive. He was the son of King Tros, who gave Troy its name. One day, while Ganymede was watching over his father’s sheep, Zeus became infatuated with the shepherd boy and swooped down on the Trojan plain in the form of an eagle, carrying Ganymede up to Olympus (or, according to an alternative version, sent an eagle to do it for him). The eagle is commemorated in the neighbouring constellation of Aquila. In another version of the myth, Ganymede was first carried off by Eos, goddess of the dawn, who had a passion for young men, and Zeus then stole Ganymede from her. Ganymede became wine-waiter to the gods, dispensing nectar from his bowl, to the annoyance of Zeus’s wife Hera. Robert Graves tells us that this myth became highly popular in ancient Greece and Rome where it was regarded as signifying divine endorsement for homosexuality. The Latin translation of the name Ganymede gave rise to the word catamite.
Aquarius and his water jar, from the Atlas Coelestis of John Flamsteed.If this myth seems insubstantial to us, it is perhaps a result of the Greeks imposing their own story on a constellation adopted from elsewhere. The constellation of the water pourer originally seems to have represented the Egyptian god of the Nile – but, as Robert Graves notes, the Greeks were not much interested in the Nile. Germanicus Caesar identifies the constellation with Deucalion, son of Prometheus, one of the few men to escape the great flood. ‘Deucalion pours forth water, that hostile element he once fled, and in so doing draws attention to his small pitcher’, wrote Germanicus. Hyginus offers the additional identification of the constellation with Cecrops, an early king of Athens, seen making sacrifices to the gods using water, for he ruled in the days before wine was made. Several stars in Aquarius have names beginning with ‘Sad’. In Arabic, sa’d means ‘luck’. Alpha Aquarii is called Sadalmelik, from sa’d al-malik, usually translated as ‘the lucky stars of the king’. Beta Aquarii is called Sadalsuud, from sa’d al-su’ud, possibly meaning ‘luckiest of the lucky’. Gamma Aquarii is Sadachbia, from sa’d al-akhbiya, possibly meaning ‘lucky stars of the tents’. The exact significance of these names has been lost even by the Arabs, according to the German expert on star names, Paul Kunitzsch.
CanCer the Crab
The crab is a minor character in one of the labours of Heracles (the Greek name for Hercules). While Heracles was fighting the multi-headed monster called the Hydra in the swamp near Lerna, the crab emerged from the swamp and added its own attack by biting Heracles on the foot. Heracles angrily stamped on the crab, crushing it. For this modest contribution to history, we are told that the goddess Hera, the enemy of Heracles, put the crab among the stars of the zodiac. Fittingly enough for such a minor character, it is the faintest of the zodiacal constellations, with no star brighter than fourth magnitude. The star Alpha Cancri is named Acubens, from the Arabic meaning ‘claw’.
Cancer, from the Uranographia of Johann Bode. At its centre lies the star cluster Praesepe, flanked on the north and south by the stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis. Two stars in the constellation are named Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis, Latin names meaning the ‘northern ass’ and ‘southern ass’, and they have their own legend. According to Eratosthenes, during the battle between the gods and the Giants that followed the overthrow of the Titans, the gods Dionysus, Hephaestus and some companions came riding on donkeys to join the fray. The Giants had never heard the braying of donkeys before and took flight at the noise, thinking that some dreadful monster was about to be unleashed upon them. Dionysus put the asses in the sky, either side of the cluster of stars which the Greeks called Phatne, the Manger, from which the asses seem to be feeding. Ptolemy described Phatne as ‘the nebulous mass in the chest’. Astronomers now know this star cluster by its Latin name Praesepe, but it is popularly termed the Beehive (praesepe can mean both ‘manger’ and ‘hive’).
The tropic of Cancer is the latitude on Earth at which the Sun appears overhead at noon on the summer solstice, June 21. In the time of the ancient Greeks the Sun lay among the stars of Cancer on this date, but the wobble of the Earth on its axis called precession has since moved the summer solstice from Cancer through neighbouring Gemini and into Taurus.
