Why hello, my lovelies.
I have written a new installment in The Constellations, which you can read here.
… you not only can, but should. There’s a hellhound!
There is just…. So. Much. Myth.
Long blog post ahead.
The myth
Canis Major is the Great Dog. We’re on a bit of a dog roll, in fact. The last constellation, alphabetically, was Canes Venatici, and the next one will be Canis Minor.
Woof.
It’s an old constellation, with Sirius as its brightest star, and some of the ancient Greeks just called it Kyon, the Dog. It’s right next to Orion in the sky, so, not surprisingly, it has been identified as Orion’s guard dog or hunting dog.
There seems to be some mix-up between Canis Major and Canis Minor; Canis Minor is associated with Maira, the dog belonging to Icarios (or Boötes, in The Constellations universe), but some sources seem to put Canis Major as Maira, and both constellations are considered hunting dogs of Orion, as well.
Well, it wouldn’t be mythology if everyone could keep their stories straight, now, would it?
Eratosthenes and Hyginus are both good sources about Canis Major. Apparently Zeus gave it to Europa as a guard dog (Eratosthenes says he gave her a javelin, too); in case you were wondering, yes, Zeus abducted and raped her- he’s a pretty one-dimensional deity who really needs a new hobby.
Minos got the dog and javelin (probably inherited them, as Europa’s eldest child). When Procris cured him of an illness, he gave them to her as a reward, since she liked to hunt. Of course, feminism hadn’t been invented yet, and when Cephalus married Procris, her property became his.
Whew, deep breath. We’ve traced the exciting trail of ownership. Yay.
Procris and Cephalus
Ovid goes into detail about Procris and Cephalus- it isn’t happy. It’s a version of the Great Dog and the javelin that never misses myth that I didn’t use, but it hardly needs me to try to write a new version of it, when Ovid him-freaking-self covered it so well in the Metamorphoses.
Dawn kidnapped and raped Cephalus (at last, a bit of gender equality!- leave it to Ovid to gender-bend the “deity rapes human” trope). When she released him after keeping him chained up in her basement for rather a while, she convinced him that his wife Procris had been unfaithful to him in the meantime, since she was jealous and angry she couldn’t get Cephalus to love her instead of Procris.
Can’t imagine why he wouldn’t adore his kidnapper and rapist.
Cephalus was a certifiable moron, apparently all pretty face and no brains, and decided to return to Procris in disguise and try to seduce her, to literally create a problem for himself. Procris dumped his dumb ass and followed Artemis for two years (the Greek equivalent of taking the kids and going to stay with her mom). When he finally apologized, she came to back him, bringing along the javelin and hound. (Ovid’s account is slightly different than my other sources, in that he’s saying the hunting dog came directly from Artemis.)
Remember how Dawn is a jealous, raping bitch?
Right. She’s still not over Cephalus, and made sure Procris heard an untrue rumor about Cephalus stepping out on her; Procris tailed him into the woods to see if it was true he had a rendezvous. Cephalus actually was just out hunting with Procris’ javelin. She was following him, staying hidden, and he made the same idiot mistake hunters have apparently been making since the beginning of time- he pulled the trigger (threw the lance, whatever) at a movement in the brush, without knowing exactly what he was aiming at. It was Procris, and the javelin never missed….
Right, moving on.
The Teumessian Fox vs. Laelaps
My translation of Eratosthenes says Cephalus “went to Thebes, taking the dog with him, to hunt the fox, which, so an oracle had declared, could not be killed by anyone whatever. Zeus, being at a loss as to what to do, turned the fox to stone, and raised up the dog to set it among the constellations, judging it to be worthy of that honor.”
[And to think, I’ve been criticized for how many commas I use!]
He says, alternatively, it’s Orion’s dog (which would make it…. not Laelaps), and was so loyal that when Orion was placed among the stars, it went, too.
Aww.
Hyginus says much the same, but differs in that the fox “had been granted the power, so they say, of being able to escape from all dogs….”
According to Ovid, Laelaps is the Whirlwind, and runs so fast that pretty much all you ever see of him are his pawprints in the dust. It was Cephalus who took Laelaps to hunt the monster (the Teumessian Fox, in other sources) terrorizing Thebes. A god turned Laelaps and the monster into stone, because “The god must have wanted neither to lose.”
I like Ovid’s take on it, rather the older idea that Zeus couldn’t abide a paradox.
Orion
Obviously, Orion was going to be mixed up in the story, anyways, since Canis Major is one of his hunting dogs.
Orion is the sky’s great hunter, a handsome douchebag who carries an unbreakable bronze club- he’s either very tall or a giant, depending on your source.
He gets his own constellation later, so we don’t need a whole lot of detail on Orion, but I was intrigued by how he seems to hang out with Artemis and her mother Leto. He hunted with both of them. Some myths, he’s busy pissing Artemis off by boasting he’s such a mighty hunter he can kill anything, or by threatening to kill every wild beast on earth (she makes the earth open up and send out a scorpion to bite him- so he’s a mighty dead hunter; or she just straight up shoots him full of arrows). [Ovid tells it differently- that Orion was trying to protect Leto from a scorpion, and that’s how he was stung.] He’s always trying to rape somebody.
There’s another version of him and Artemis, though, where she loves him and is thinking of abandoning her bachelorette hunting days and getting married. Her twin Apollo won’t have it. When Orion is out for a swim, Apollo challenges the mighty huntress to put an arrow through a black speck far out in the water.
Well, Artemis is a Legolas-level archer, so she makes the shot.
The black speck is Orion’s head.
Anyways, I was interested in how Orion, Artemis, and Leto are all great hunters who hunted together. If Orion’s dog was going to be a hellhound, and he was going to be hunting something- why not have all of them out there, hunting souls? What happens when Death comes for the woman who cannot be caught?
The story
I deliberately set out to write a story about a hellhound, but, once my research led me to the myth of the Teumessian Fox, the hellhound was doomed to not be the star in its own story.
I kept finding conflicting opinions and translations of the Teumessian Fox’s ability. There’s a big difference between being so swift that you can never be caught, being able to escape any dog that pursues you, and having the ability to never be killed by anyone whatsoever. Rather than sort the confusion out at the start, I decided to work it all into the story.
Yes, I realize the historical area is Teumessus, not Teumessia, but Teumessia just sounds cooler, damn it. Mirzam of Teumessus? It’s got no ring to it.
The ending of the story of Laelaps and the Teumessian Fox is extraordinarily unsatisfying to me. Zeus solves the paradox by turning them both to stone? The hound gets a constellation in the sky, but the lovely swift foxie doesn’t?
Such typical Greek bullshit.
— not to mention that I adore foxies!
[I made the acquaintance of a whole family of delightful gray foxies a few years back when I was out prowling at night, by the way. Thus began my obsession with foxies. {You try not getting obsessed with these critters when you watch a whole adorable fluffy family of them grow up over the summer! The fur! The cute noises! The frolicking!} We initially met when one of the parent foxies and I were both taking a shortcut across the same lawn, and, quite honestly, scared the holy crap out of each other. We bumped into one other, the foxie yelped, I screamed, we ran to opposite ends of the lawn, and then we turned around and stared at each other to check that we were both equally embarrassed over the whole incident. It was the beginning of a beautiful thing, and should give you some idea of what stealthy Creatures of the Night™ both foxies and I can be.]
Due to our association of foxes with cleverness, I thought the foxie in this story ought to solve the paradox of inescapable hound versus uncatchable fox through cunning. So, she steals the javelin that never misses, and just plain bluffs Orion when he and Laelaps catch up to her again.
Not to brag or anything, but it’s a much better solution to the paradox than turning both critters to stone.
This foxie lived to run another day.
This hellhound, too…. who is a good hellhound, yes he is! (Also, what does he eat? Souls?!)
And Orion seems like an undeserving, cocky prick, but he has his own constellation further down the alphabet, so he’s definitely going to make a reappearance. Plus, Artemis and her mother Leto seem really cool… I rather fancy writing about the three of them, in fact.
The constellation
Canis Major’s most prominent feature is the star Sirius. It’s visible in the Northern Hemisphere right now- just go outside, find Orion, and draw a line right to left through his belt. It’ll run very close by Sirius, and Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. You can’t really miss it.
Do you know what the brightest star in the whole sky is?
That’s right, smartass. The sun is.
Sirius is only 8.6 lightyears away- it’s the sun’s 5th closest neighbor.
Sirius is where we get the dog days of summer from; the name is from the Greek seirios, “scorcher,” and it’s also known as the Dog Star. It rises over the horizon at the same time as the sun during the hottest part of the summer (this is called a heliacal rising: when a star rises at daybreak), and the ancient Greeks thought it was responsible for contributing the additional heat that made these days extra crispy. Sirius is indeed a very hot star (that’s why its light looks so blue), so they had that much right.
Every society has some contrary punks, though, and Manilius thought that Sirius being blue meant it was a cold star. That’s what gave me the (frankly, brilliant) idea for a hellhound with an icy bite.
The fact that I do my own stunts is what gave me the idea for a neck injury. You’re welcome.
Manilius also described Canis Major as “the dog with the blazing face,” which I chose to take both literally for Laelaps’ markings, and figuratively in that who doesn’t love a hellhound that glows with the icy fire of the Underworld?
Nice doggy.
Adhara (Epsilon CMa) and Adlura (Eta CMa) are both the names of stars in Canis Major, derived from the same Arabic root, and I thought they were matchy-matchy enough to sound like twins. Mirzam is the name of a star (Beta CMa) in Canis Major, too. It means “herald,” and it isn’t the only star with this name- the Arabs tended to give it to the star that rose just before the brightest star in a constellation. Mirzam precedes Sirius.
Canis Major occupies the portion of our sky where you can find the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, which is the galaxy closest to ours.
Egyptian Mythology
Yes, yet more mythology that I didn’t use in the story, but, damn it, it’s just so cool!
The ancient Egyptians called Sirius Sopdet (Greek/Latinization: Sothis). It was the basis of their solar calendar (they swapped out from a lunar calendar), and its heliacal rising coincided with the annual floods from the Nile- Egypt depended on those floods to be able to grow food.
In the Old Kingdom, Sothis was a goddess of the floods and a psychopomp for deceased pharaohs, guiding them to the Underworld. She was represented as a woman with a 5-pointed star on her head. After getting mixed up with the Dog Star myths, she was sometimes depicted as a large dog, or a woman riding one.
I have to say, the Egyptian solar calendar was pretty neat. Their Sothic Cycle was 1,461 civil years, each of them with 365 days. Over a cycle, the years lose enough time that the start of the next one again coincides with the heliacal rising of Sirius- the period between heliacal risings is about 365.25 days. A Sothic year is approximately one minute longer than a Julian year.
The things you learn on wikipedia, my pets!