Warning: The following column discusses the importance to ancient cultures of the human effluent colloquially known as tinkle. Sorry, but as you will see, it’s necessary.
Orion dominates the winter sky. He’s done so since humans have told stories about the stars. There’s a good reason for that. His stars are bright, and he resembles (in stick-figure form, at least) the character from Greco-Roman mythology after which he is named.
Winter has the reputation of having the brightest stars of all the seasons of the year, but it actually doesn’t if you look at the whole sky.
What it has is Orion, complete with his entourage. Orion’s main stars are bright, but they are no match for the head of his hunting dog Canis Major. Find Orion’s bright belt stars and use them as pointers down and to the left to find the nighttime sky’s most brilliant star. Sirius, the “Scorching One,” represents the dog’s head.
Find the belt stars again and use them as pointers up and to the right. You will discover the V-shaped head of Taurus, the Bull, with its bright, red, bloodshot eye, also known as the star Aldebaran.
Keep on going up and to the right, and you will discover a small, dipper-shaped collection of six stars called the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, perched on the Bull’s shoulder.
Because of Orion’s felicitous placement of bright stars, Orion has been recognized since ancient times as the most beautiful of constellations.
The third century BCE poet Aratus writes, “Aslant beneath the forebody of the Bull/is set the great Orion. Let none who pass him,/ Spread out on high on a cloudless night, imagine that,/Gazing on the heavens/one shall see other stars more fair.”
The stars in the rectangle that outline Orion’s body are bright enough to have been named by ancient Arab astronomers. Bellatrix (the Amazon Star) forms Orion’s left shoulder. Saiph (“Sword”) is Orion’s left foot, which makes no sense unless Orion had an uncharacteristic accident with his weapon.
Orion’s right shoulder is Betelgeuse, which may be a highly corrupted form of an Arabic expression that means “the armpit of the giant.” (There is some disagreement among constellational scholars about Orion’s armpit. I am frequently amazed by some of the subjects under dispute by scholars.)
Hanging from the left-most star of Orion’s belt is his sword.
Near the end of the sword is the most beautiful object to observe with a small telescope — the Great Orion Nebula. This bright patch is easily visible with binoculars. A telescope reveals complex swirls of glowing hydrogen gas.
Orion holds his shield before him, and above, he brandishes his upraised club. In practically every culture on Earth, he has been called a hunter or warrior.
He predates the classical Greek civilization to the agricultural and even hunting cultures that preceded it. For them, he was a kind of sky calendar.
When he rose at dawn, people saw a sign of approaching summer and, in the evening, a sign of winter. When he rose at midnight, the time had come for the grape harvest.
The earliest written references to Orion come from the ancient Egyptian civilization. To them, he represented Osiris, their God of Light.
The earliest Greek story about Orion most likely originated in the Boeotian region of central Greece.
Boeotia had its heyday during the Mycenaean age, the first period of Greek civilization. The Mycenaeans lived between 1750 to 1050 BCE.
Hyria, a village featured in the story below, dates back to that era. Archaeologists have found Mycenaean pottery at nearby Megalo Vouno, a low peak in Central Greece. They speculate that the site contains the tattered shards of a once-proud city-state.
The story below thus becomes one of the oldest in the pantheon of Greek constellational myths.
In those days, Orion was known as Urion, “of the urine” or “urine born,” as first century BCE writer Hyginus would have it. His name seems a grotesque insult, but it wasn’t, as we shall see. Here’s the story, derived from Hyginus’s Poetic Astronomy.
One day, the gods Zeus, Hermes, and Poseidon came down from their heavenly perch on Mt. Olympus to wander on the Earth. They walked into the village of Hyria and were fed and entertained abundantly by King Hyrieus, the town’s founder.
In gratitude, the gods granted the king a wish, his heart’s desire. The childless monarch gratefully wished for a son.
To grease the wheels, Hyrieus sacrificed an ox in front of the trio of gods. He then placed it before them as a dish at the banquet honoring their presence.
The gods granted his request in a most unusual way. Zeus commanded that the hide be stripped from the ox carcass. The gods then urinated on it and ordered it to be buried.
Sometime later, a lad emerged, fully formed, from the ground.
Given his curious origin, it seemed natural enough to name the boy Urion. Hyginus writes that the name Urion eventually morphed into Orion.
According to constellation scholar Julius DW Stall, the stretched-out ox hide, not Orion himself, is memorialized in the seven bright stars that make up Orion’s shoulders, feet and belt.
The story sounds pretty gross to our modern sensibilities. However, urine was a valuable commodity with almost magical characteristics to the ancients.
One of the components of urine is urea. That’s carbamide for all you chemists out there. If you let urine sit around for a while, its urea chemically transforms into ammonia.
Look at that bottle of liquid household cleaner you have around your place. One of its ingredients is probably ammonia.
As a result, aged urine was used as a cleanser and disinfectant for centuries. We think of urine as “dirty.” In those ancient days, laundries used urine as a bleach to bring the luster back to stained, white togas.
Urine also had significant industrial use. The ammonia in urine was very effective in softening animal skins. As a result, it was the not-so-secret ingredient to tan leather.
Consequently, wee-wee was a hot commodity in ancient times, especially among the Romans. Tanners and laundries vigorously competed for the effluent from Roman public toilets. People placed jars on the street for people to pee in and then sold the results.
Make no mistake about it. Orion was revered because he owed his existence to the holy tinkle of the gods.
Thus, he was, in Boeotia at least, a figure of cult-like adoration, even though he was neither a god nor claimed to be one.
Signs of their love for Orion appear in the writings of the third or fourth century Boeotian poet Korinna. A line from her poetry is echoed centuries later in the first line of the Christian Lord’s Prayer:
“Orion, our father, having regained his own land … now dwells in the sky.”
For centuries, the residents of the town of Tanagra in Boeotia worshipped Orion. According to French classical historian Denis Knoeplfer, Tanagrans honored Orion with a feast day well into the period of the Roman empire.
Most Orion myths emphasize his positive features, such as bravery and strength. However, they also demonstrate qualities less attractive to a modern reader — his headstrong and boastful nature.
According to Hesiod, a Greek poet who wrote around 700 BCE, Orion was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the daughter of King Minos of Crete.
His father equipped him with the ability, as some sources have it, to walk on water. Other writers say he could walk underwater on the sea floor without taking a breath.
It was a handy talent to have, as the following story illustrates.
On a trip to the island of Chios, Orion fell in lust with the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades. He was particularly enamored of Merope, the daughter of Oenopion, the island’s king.
According to the first-century CE Greek writer Pseudo-Eratosthenes, he “violated” Merope — while drunk, no less.
As any doting father would, Oenopion “took it badly.” He seized upon Orion’s drunken befuddlement to blind Orion and banished him from the island.
During Orion’s sightless meanderings, he happened upon Hephaestus (Vulcan, to the Romans), the god of the forge and weapons maker to the gods.
Hephaestus took pity on the blind hero and gave Orion Cedalion, the weapon’s maker’s assistant, to act as his eyes.
Cedalion guided him to the east, where the light from the rising sun cured him of his blindness.
After many adventures, Orion’s foolhardy pride eventually led to his death. The gods lifted Orion into the sky, where the Greek deities seemed to store all the characters they admired or found annoying.
In this case, Orion’s elevation to the celestial sphere is also a curse.
The gods also put Merope and her six sisters in the sky as the glorious Pleiades, where Orion must follow them across the sky, always pursuing but never catching them.
