HERAKLES was an Olympian demigod worshipped as the divine protector of mankind.
In classical art Herakles was depicted as a muscular man with a club and lion-skin cape.
Pausanias, Description of Greece 4. 8. 2 : “The ancestral gods (patroioi) of the Dorians, Herakles above all.”
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 19. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) : “There is also the place called Kynosarges, sacred to Herakles; the story of the white dog [Kynosarges may mean ‘white-dog’] may be known by reading the oracle. (Think Sirius and The Fool)
Orion (Ὠρίων in Greek) is the most splendid of constellations, befitting a character who was in legend the tallest and most handsome of men. His right shoulder and left foot are marked by the brilliant stars Betelgeuse and Rigel, with a distinctive line of three stars forming his belt. ‘No other constellation more accurately represents the figure of a man’, says Germanicus Caesar. Manilius called it ‘golden Orion’ and ‘the mightiest of constellations’, and exaggerated its brilliance by saying that, when Orion rises, ‘night feigns the brightness of day and folds its dusky wings’. Manilius described Orion as ‘stretching his arms over a vast expanse of sky and rising to the stars with no less huge a stride’. In fact, Orion is not an exceptionally large constellation, ranking only 26th in size (smaller, for instance, than Perseus according to the modern constellation boundaries), but the brilliance of its stars gives it the illusion of being much larger. Orion is also one of the most ancient constellations, being among the few star groups known to the earliest Greek writers such as Homer and Hesiod. Even in the space age, Orion remains one of the few star patterns that non-astronomers can recognize.
In the sky, Orion is depicted facing the snorting charge of neighbouring Taurus the bull, yet the myth of Orion makes no reference to such a combat. However, the constellation originated with the Sumerians, who saw in it their great hero Gilgamesh fighting the Bull of Heaven. The Sumerian name for Orion was URU AN-NA, meaning light of heaven. Taurus was GUD AN-NA, bull of heaven. Gilgamesh was the Sumerian equivalent of Heracles, which brings us to another puzzle. Being the greatest hero of Greek mythology, Heracles deserves a magnificent constellation such as this one, but in fact is consigned to a much more obscure area of sky. So is Orion really Heracles in another guise? It might seem so, for one of the labours of Heracles was to catch the Cretan bull, which would fit the Orion–Taurus conflict in the sky. Ptolemy described him with club and lion’s pelt, both familiar attributes of Heracles, and he is shown this way on old star maps. Yet despite these parallels, no mythologist hints at a connection between this constellation and Heracles.
Chinese associationsChinese astronomers knew Orion as Shen, a great hunter or warrior, one of the rare cases in which a constellation was visualized almost exactly the same way in China as in Europe. Shen was at the centre of a great celestial hunting scene, for the full Moon was in this part of the sky during the hunting season, November and December. Shen (‘three stars’, referring to the stars of Orion’s belt) is also the name of the 21st lunar mansion; evidently Shen originally consisted of just the three belt stars, and the others were incorporated later.
In its final form Shen consisted of 10 stars: the four that make up the traditional outline of Orion (Alpha, Gamma, Beta, and Kappa), the three stars of the belt, and three stars in the sword. The sword stars had a dual identity, for they also formed a sub-constellation, Fa. In keeping with Shen’s identity as a warrior chief, the 10 stars were also imagined as his various army generals. The triangle of stars that forms Orion’s head (Lambda, Phi-1, and Phi-2) was known as Zi (also written Zui), ‘turtle beak’, although it might also be the beak of a falcon used for hunting. Zi was also the name of the 20th lunar mansion. It was the narrowest of all 28 mansions, barely 2° wide. The arc of stars that we see today as Orion’s shield was interpreted in China as a banner, Shenqi, or sometimes a longbow. Being one of the oldest Chinese constellations, Shen gathered many different and conflicting identities down the ages. Early on, it was seen as the forequarters of the White Tiger, one of the four seasonal divisions of the Chinese sky. It was also somehow associated with judicial investigations and punishments. Shen featured in an ancient Chinese legend concerning two sons of the Emperor, Shichen and Ebo, who were always fighting. So bad was the antagonism that the Emperor had to banish them both. Shichen was sent away to become responsible for sacrifices to Shen, while Ebo became responsible for sacrifices to the lunar mansion Xin, in present-day Scorpius on the opposite side of the sky from Shen. This story parallels the Greek legend of Orion and his antagonist the scorpion being placed on opposite sides of the sky to keep them permanently apart. –
Ian Ridpath
The cult of Hercules was one of the oldest and most popular in Italy. Believed to have been introduced from the Greek colonies of Croton and Tarentum in Magna Graecia, statues have also been found as early as 500 B.C.E in Eturia, which bordered Greek Campania. Hercules was regarded as a protector of travellers due to his myth and he was also worshipped by philosophers; Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics viewing him as the ideal man. –
C. Schultz
Images of Orion in classical art are difficult to recognize, and clear examples are rare. There are several ancient Greek images of club-carrying hunters that could represent Orion,[59] but such generic examples could equally represent an archetypal “hunter”, or indeed Heracles.[60] Some claims have been made that other Greek art represents specific aspects of the Orion myth. A tradition of this type has been discerned in 5th century BC Greek pottery—John Beazley identified a scene of Apollo, Delian palm in hand, revenging Orion for the attempted rape of Artemis, while another scholar has identified a scene of Orion attacking Artemis as she is revenged by a snake (a counterpart to the scorpion) in a funerary group—supposedly symbolizing the hope that even the criminal Orion could be made immortal, as well as an astronomical scene in which Cephalus is thought to stand in for Orion and his constellation, also reflecting this system of iconography.[61] Also, a tomb frieze in Taranto (ca. 300 BC) may show Orion attacking Opis.[62] But the earliest surviving clear depiction of Orion in classical art is Roman, from the depictions of the Underworld scenes of the Odyssey discovered at the Esquiline Hill (50–40 BC). Orion is also seen on a 4th-century bas-relief,[63] currently affixed to a wall in the Porto neighborhood of Naples. The constellation Orion rises in November, the end of the sailing season, and was associated with stormy weather (
I am the one who maketh the lightning flash and the thunder roll )
On the last day of the Sun’s passage through Gemini, the day of his entry into the sign of Cancer, the Sun loses his head on the Summer Solstice, and the days begin to shorten in the Northern Hemisphere. Light slowly bleeds out of the day, and darkness rises.
And so here it is. The Headless One’s Head is the Sun, and the execution day when the head rolls off the shoulders is the Summer Solstice. Suddenly, a great many folk and spiritual and astrological traditions make sense — that a period of ten or so days just before the Summer Solstice is the only time of year that the Headless One actually has a Solar head.
The answer, at a minimum, was that if Taurus was the home of the Full Moon, that meant that the Sun had to be late in Sagittarius or early in Capricorn. The Seventh Mansion of the Moon, dedicated to Scheliel, was a possibility. So was the Fifth Mansion, whose image is traditionally a Head, at least according to Picatrix. And The Fifth Mansion, tropically, is in the right-ish place, although sidereally it leaves a lot to be desired.
That places the season of the Headless One’s return in the First-ish Decan of Capricorn.
When is the Sun in the First Decan of Capricorn? And some calculations later… Capricorn begins around December 21…
So The Headless One, i.e. Orion, approximately wears the Full Moon as his head at around the Winter Solstice. More or less every year. Some years it might be more precisely timed — some years it might be a little out of whack, left or right. I’m not sure it matters to me although I can see some years as being worthy of greater celebrations because the Moon was in exactly the right place, right at the middle of the shoulders.
And it explains the tremendous relief and celebration of the winter Solstice throughout the northern hemisphere, to my mind, as well — The Sun is returning, and the Moon is riding on the shoulders of Orion. Again. It’s a never-failing promise, really, and for ancient peoples it was a relevant sign that the universe had an underlying order and synchrony.
In truth though, sometimes it’s all of the planets. At times, such as when the moon sits upon the shoulders of Orion, it’s the Moon. Sometimes it’s the Sun. Sometimes it’s Jupiter or Mars. Sometimes it might be Venus or Mercury or Saturn. And I imagine that these different moments carried very different meanings to those who observed them — that the Headless One wore the planets like a series of helmets or heads at various times.
But it strikes me as no accident that one of the Behenian Stars, Capella, helps place a secondary marker in the sky, above the shoulders of Orion, to help judge when a given planet is coming into the right place at the right time. Capella marks the position of Almathea, the nurse-maid goat of Zeus, who fed the god in diapers and in hiding when Saturn/Cronos threatened to eat all his children. When one of the other planets comes upon the shoulders of the Headless One, otherwise known as the constellation Orion, the light of Capella nourishes and feeds that divine emanation, and the newly headed Headless One beams new power into the world — love and sex when the Head is Venus, war when the Head is Mars, and so on. – https://andrewbwatt.com/2016/11/06/the-headless-one/
