Orion

ORION, a hunter of Boeotian Hyria, and the handsomest man alive, was the son of Poseidon and Euryale. Coming one day to Hyria in Chios, he fell in love with Merope, daughter of Dionysus’s son Oenopion. Oenopion had promised Merope to Orion in marriage, if he would free the island from the dangerous wild beasts that infested it; and this he set himself to do, bringing the pelts to Merope every evening. But when the task was at last accomplished, and he claimed her as his wife, Oenopion brought him rumours of lions, bears, and wolves still lurking in the hills, and refused to give her up, the fact being that he was in love with her himself.

b. One night Orion, in disgust, drank a skinful of Oenopion’s wine, which so inflamed him that he broke into Merope’s bedroom, and forced her to lie with him. When dawn came, Oenopion invoked his father, Dionysus, who sent satyrs to ply Orion with still more wine, until he fell fast asleep; whereupon Oenopion put out both his eyes and flung him on the seashore. An oracle announced that the blind man would regain his sight, if he travelled to the east and turned his eye-sockets towards Helius at the point where he first rises from Ocean. Orion at once rowed out to sea in a small boat and, following the sound of a Cyclops’s hammer, reached Lemnos. There he entered the smithy of Hephaestus, snatched up an apprentice named Cedalion, and carried him off on his shoulders as a guide. Cedalion led Orion over land and sea, until he came at last to the farthest Ocean, where Eos fell in love with him, and her brother Helius duly restored his sight.

c. After visiting Delos in Eos’s company, Orion returned to avenge himself on Oenopion, whom he could not, however, find anywhere in Chios, because he was hiding in an underground chamber made for him by Hephaestus. Sailing on to Crete, where he thought that Oenopion might have fled for protection to his grandfather Minos, Orion met Artemis, who shared his love of the chase. She soon persuaded him to forget his vengeance and, instead, come hunting with her.

d. Now, Apollo was aware that Orion had not refused Eos’s invitation to her couch in the holy island of Delos-Dawn still daily blushes to remember this indiscretion-and, further, boasted that he rid the whole earth of wild beasts and monsters. Fearing, therefore, his sister Artemis might prove as susceptible as Eos, Apollo went Mother Earth and, mischievously repeating Orion’s boast, arranged for a monstrous scorpion to pursue him. Orion attacked the scorpion first with arrows, then with his sword, but, finding that its armour is proof against any mortal weapon, dived into the sea and swam in the direction of Delos where, he hoped, Eos would protect him. Apollo then called to Artemis: ‘Do you see that black object bobbing about in the sea, far away, close to Ortygia? It is the head of a villain, called Candaon, who has just seduced Opis, one of your Hyperborean priestesses. I challenge you to transfix it with an arrow!’ Now, Cadaon was Orion’s Boeotian nickname, though Artemis did not know this. She took careful aim, let fly, and, swimming out to retrieve the quarry, found that she had shot Orion through the head. In great grief she implored Apollo’s son Asclepius to revive him, and he consented but was destroyed by Zeus’s thunderbolt before he could accomplish his task. Artemis then set Orion’s image among the stars, eternally pursued by the Scorpion; his ghost had already descended to Asphodel Fields.

e. Some, however, say that the scorpion stung Orion to death, a that Artemis was vexed with him for having amorously chased the virgin companions, the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, they fled across the meadows of Boeotia, until the gods, having changed them into doves, set their images among the stars. But this is a mistaken account, since the Pleiades were not virgins: three of the had lain with Zeus, two with Poseidon, one with Ares, and the seventh married Sisyphus of Corinth, and failed to be included in the constellation, because Sisyphus was a mere mortal.

f. Others tell the following strange story of Orion’s birth, to account for his name (which is sometimes written Urion) and for the tradition that he was a son of Mother Earth. Hyricus,  a poor bee-keeper a farmer, had vowed to have no children, and he grew old and impotent. When, one day, Zeus and Hermes visited him in disguise, and were hospitably entertained, they enquired what gift he most desired. Sighing deeply, Hyricus replied that what he most wanted, namely to have a son, was now impossible. The gods, however, instructed him to sacrifice a bull, make water on its hide, and then bury it in his wit grave. He did so and, nine months later, a child was born to him, who he named Urion-‘he who makes water’-and, indeed, both the rising and setting of the constellation Orion bring rain.

1. Orion’s story consists of three or four unrelated myths strung together. The first, confusedly told, is that of Oenopion. This concerns a sacred king’s unwillingness to resign his throne, at the close of his term, even when the new candidate for kingship had been through his ritual combats and married the queen with the usual feasting. But the new king is only an interrex who, after reigning for one day, is duly murdered and devoured by Maenads; the old king, who has been shamming dead in a tomb, then remarries the queen and continues his reign.

2. The irrelevant detail of the Cyclops’s hammer explains Orion’s blindness: a mythological picture of Odysseus searing the drunken Cyclops’s eye has apparently been combined with a Hellenic allegory: how the Sun Titan is blinded every evening by his enemies, but restored to sight by the following Dawn. Orion (‘the dweller on the mountain’) and Hyperion (‘the dweller on high’) are, in fact, identified here. Orion’s boast that he would exterminate the wild beasts not only refers to his ritual combats, but is a fable of the rising Sun, at whose appearance all wild beasts retire to their dens.

3. Plutarch’s account of the scorpion sent by the god Set to kill the Child Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, in the hottest part of the summer, explains Orion’s death by scorpion-bite and Artemis’s appeal to Asclepius (Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris). Horus died, but Ra, the Sun-god, revived him, and later he avenged his father Osiris’s death; in the original myth Orion, too, will have been revived. Orion is also, in part, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian Heracles, whom Scorpion-men attack in the Tenth Tablet of the Calendar epic-a myth which concerned the mortal wounding of the sacred king as the Sun rose in Scorpio. Exactly at what season the wounding took place depends on the antiquity of the myth; when the Zodiac originated, Scorpio was probably an August sign, but in Classical times the precession of the equinoxes had advanced it to October.

4. Another version of Orion’s death is recorded on one of the Hittite Ras Shamra tablets. Anat, or Anatha, the Battle-goddess, fell in love with a handsome hunter named Aqhat, and when he vexatiously refused to give her his bow, asked the murderous Yatpan to steal it from him. To her great grief the clumsy Yatpan not only killed Aqhat, but dropped the bow into the sea. The astronomical meaning of this myth is that Orion and the Bow-a part of the constellation, which the Greeks called ‘The Hound’-sink below the southern horizon for two whole months every spring. In Greece this story seems to have been adapted to a legend of how the orgiastic priestesses of Artemis-Opis being a rifle of Artemis herself-killed an amorous visitor to their islet of Ortygia. And in Egypt since the return of the constellation Orion introduces the summer heat, it was confusingly identified with Horus’s enemy Set, the two bright star above him being his ass’s ears.

5. The myth of Orion’s birth is perhaps more than a comic tale modelled on that of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid: Metamorphoses), and told to account for the first syllable of his ancient name Urion-as though it were derived from ourein, ‘to urinate’, not from ouros, the Homeric form of oros, ‘mountain’. Yet a primitive African rain-producing charm, which consists in making water on a bull’s hide may have been known to the Greeks; and that Orion was a son of Poseidon, the water-god, is a clear allusion to his rain-making powers.

6. The name Pleiades, from the root plei, ‘to sail’, refers to their rising at the season when good weather for sailing approaches. But Pindar form Peleiades, ‘flock of doves’, was perhaps the original form, since the Hyades are piglets. It appears that a seventh star in the group became extinct towards the end of the second millennium; since Hyginus (Fabula) says that Electra disappeared in grief for the destruction of the House of Dardanus. Orion’s vain pursuit of the Pleiades, which occur in the Bull constellation, refers to their rising above the horizon just before the reappearance of Orion.