Constellations IX: Boötes drop party

Hello, lovelies!

I’m excited about this latest installment of The Constellations, which you can read here.

In fact, I’ve been looking forward to writing about Boötes, whom I thought I’d style the Guardian of the North, since last summer. Any time something as fascinating as a Guardian of the North is involved, it’s bound to be a fun story to write. I thought, there’ll be a strong, silent type guardian, probably a bear, maybe a damsel. It was going to be stirring and serious.

Then, of course, I finally reached the B’s in the alphabetical list of the constellations, and I started sketching up a story for Boötes.

… and, the next thing you know, a bunch of pirates have just wandered in and dropped anchor. Pirates are like that.

I discovered that in any pirate story, at least one of the pirates must be intelligent, or there’s no getting them to do anything other than say “Arrh!”, shoot at things, guzzle rum, and bury treasure. Call it Pirate Writing Rule #1.

The Myths

Boötes has a complicated mess of mythology attached to it. How much of that myth did I decide to mash up into this story?

All of it.

Buckle in and sit back. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

The basics

Boötes (the dots over the o are called an umlaut and, for our purposes, mean you pronounce both o‘s) (btw, you pronounce the e, too) is an ancient constellation; Homer mentions it in the Odyssey. The name probably means “ox driver.” The ancient Greeks also referred to this constellation as Arctophylax, the “Bear Keeper/Watcher/Guard.”

Both those names make reference to another constellation with which Boötes is closely associated, Ursa Major- the Great Bear, the Plough, the Big Dipper, or, to the ancient Greeks, an ox cart.

Boötes as Arcas

There’re a whole host of variations on the story of Boötes that goes with the bear theme, but I adore Ovid, so we’re going with the Metamorphoses version. As with any number of the stories in the Metamorphoses, it starts with freaking Zeus raping someone, this time Callisto, a follower of the goddess Artemis. After Callisto gives birth to her son Arcas, Hera (instead of slapping her husband upside the head as she ought), turns Callisto into a bear.

Fast forward fifteen years. Arcas is out hunting. He encounters a bear, who happens to be Callisto. She recognizes her son, but she’s, you know, still a bear, and he kinda takes it the wrong way when she tries to come closer. Zeus intervenes before he spears her, and sets both Callisto and Arcas in the sky as constellations. Hera is furious, and asks the ocean to never let those constellations touch the water- thus, Boötes and Ursa Major never set below the horizon.

That’s what Ovid’s got to say. Did I mention the variations on this story? Sometimes Arcas is adopted by Lycaon (yes, that Lycaon, who chops him up and serves him to Zeus at dinner, and isn’t that a funny tale), and, when he encounters Callisto- oh, that’s right, Zeus reassembles him off the dinner table- hunts her and accidentally trespasses into Zeus’s temple. The penalty for this is death, but Zeus intervenes at that point.

Or a goatherd raised Arcas. Or Maia the Pleiad.

If you’re starting to have the feeling that there are very few rules about the contents of this story, just you wait, lovelies.

Boötes as Icarios

Nope, not the dude who flew too close to the sun and had his wings melt. That’s Icarus.

The main source for me on this is Hyginus.

So, Icarios is an upstanding guy, and the god Dionysus teaches him how to make wine from grapes- a very Dionysian thing to do. Icarios is apparently a bit of a philanthropist, and he shares the wine with some shepherds. They get so drunk their friends think they’ve been poisoned, so the friends murder Icarios for his troubles.

Icarios’ daughter Erigone finds his body with help from their devoted dog Maira. She is, understandably, pretty upset about the whole thing, and hangs herself. The dog, in turn, is also pretty upset about the whole thing and either lays down and dies or drowns itself.

The giggles don’t end there, pets. Young Athenian women Erigone’s age go and start hanging themselves, too, since Erigone had prayed for her father’s death to be investigated and avenged. When the Athenians ask Apollo WTAF is going on here, the oracle tells them what’s gone wrong. The shepherds get their just deserts and life goes on.

Unless you’re Icarios, or Erigone, or the dog, or the maidens, or the shepherds. Geez.

If I’m reading this correctly, by the way, this terrible misadventure inspired the Athenians to invent the swing (the sort where you plunk your bottom on a board and tie it to a tree with ropes) and have an annual festival for swinging, called the Aletides.

My Greek is a trifle rusty. I could be wrong.

Anyways.

Dionysus is also pretty upset about the whole thing, so he makes the constellations Boötes [Icarios], Virgo [Erigone], and Canis Minor [Maira].

Or, Maira might be Canis Major.

Or it might have been Zeus who put them up as constellations, not Dionysus. Or all the gods did it by consensus.

Remember how we talked about how this story doesn’t really have rules??

Throw It All in a Blender

Whew. Right. That was a lot of information.

I didn’t even tell you all the versions and variations I encountered in my research.

I favor the Icarios myth much more than the Arcas myth, even if everybody dies. At least it isn’t the tired trope of Zeus running around raping virgins. Asshole.

I absolutely adore the story that came to be “Boötes” out of all that dreck. Yes, I broke my own rules and let the word count get way too high- but they’re my rules, gorramn it, and I’ll break them if I like.

Boötes in my story is a bit of Icarios, a bit of Arcas, and also something of an immortal avatar/protector of all the northern lands. Part of me is fascinated enough with the character (and Erigone, who seems to be a chip off the old block) that I’m considering breaking another of my rules and writing a sequel for one of the related constellations.

After all, those pirates sailed off without their buried treasure. The sequel practically writes itself.

Odds and Ends

In trying to mash all these myths together in the setting that I settled upon/randomly picked after an afternoon hike, I made the happy discovery that grapes can be grown quite a bit farther north than I had realized- all the way to USDA Zone 3, if you can believe it. Obviously, these aren’t the varieties that populate Bordeaux, but they are grapes.

Fun fact: Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the night sky. The name translates to “bear guard.” To find it (and the rest of Boötes, by extension), one “follows the arc to Arcturus,” which is to say, if you extend the curve of the Big Dipper’s handle out past its end, the imaginary curve more or less intersects Arcturus.

Whilst I was working on the draft on the story, YouTube helpfully suggested Gwen Stefani’s newest song. Shockingly, it matched neatly with a certain exchange between Boötes and the pirate captain (which I then tweaked to better match the song, cuz if you’ve got an unintentional homage, you’d better double down on that shit and make it intentional and obvious as hell). It’s a catchy little bop, by the way: link in case you too have been living under a rock and missed it.