I give you part 5 of The Constellations. Read this installment here.
I am very fond of the constellation Aquila (The Eagle), itself. It’s a pretty, easily recognizable shape; if you’re reading this from the Northern Hemisphere, you can go look at the sky on the next clear night and see it for yourself.
Personally, I think it looks much more like a stingray than an eagle, but that’s just me. It appears the constellation has been seen as an eagle for a very long time; one of my sources claims this has been the case since 1200 BC. Anyways, Ptolemy, Eudoxus, and Aratus recorded it, so that gets us back to the fourth century BC, at least.
Remember how annoyed I was by the ancient Greek mythology associated with Aquarius last week- all that BS with Ganymede being abducted by Zeus? Right. Aquila was seen as Zeus’s eagle- the keeper of his thunderbolts, and also the abductor of Ganymede. There’s another associated myth about Zeus and Nemesis and Aphrodite, again with someone turning into an eagle and Zeus being a horrible person, and I just was not having it.
Aquila has a rather tenuous link to ancient Egyptian mythology, which is propounded in this academic paper (which I sort of skimmed and definitely did not read). Namely, the Egyptians saw Aquila as the falcon of Horus.
The ancient Egyptians are not my area of expertise, least of all their pantheon of deities. I find it extremely distressing how often one deity got subsumed by another, and how the myths about them were constantly changing and being reassigned and… it’s all very untidy.
I want rules. Clear rules. So I can smash them!
Well, there aren’t any, really, so I picked a version of Horus called Heru-ur. I made indiscriminate use of Horus and Heru-ur material. Horus’s eyes were the sun and moon; he was associated with the falcon, often depicted with the head of a falcon and a body of a man.
“Aquila” showcases all three forms of Horus/Heru-ur that I could find, because I did want to retain the Greek ideas about transforming into things, especially birds.
The udjat (or wadjet or wedjet) is the Eye of Horus, and was kind of a big deal to the ancient Egyptians. I learned that its separate components (six in total) were used to represent various fractions.
I beg the forgiveness of any Egyptologist who happens to read this. Much of what I know about ancient Egypt I learned from the movie Stargate and the tv show Stargate: SG-1.
Not the kinds of reliable sources one can cite in educated company, now are they?
It strikes me that “Apus,” “Aquarius,” and “Aquila” are all more or less variations on a theme. I like them as a trio of sorts, in that sense, but I do promise to break free of my repetitious chains and do something completely different when I write the next story in the collection, “Ara.”
Goodnight, lovelies.