#astrolatry

I had, knowing too little, grouped Orion in with the likes of Perseus and Heracles. But he has no dynasty like Heracles. He begins no great kingdom like Perseus. There are accounts that say Orion had 50 children by nymphs, but this seems more a description of his virility and well-known handsomeness than any indication of legacy or family. Orion is a hunter. The best hunter. But he does not collect magical trophies, rescue princesses, or go on great, extended quests defeating infernal chimeras. He hunts animals. He is out there, in the wild, overcoming it while being it too. He is survival. He is not a hero. He belongs nowhere. He never triumphs in a way that humans appreciate. If anything, Orion is more like a monster playing at hero. The first time I reached out to Orion in earnest, what struck me most was his profound loneliness. I was surprised. Some of this loneliness has to do with his ties to winter and death. In the Northern Hemisphere, we see him best in winter. With Orion we get the howling of dogs and wolves, the pounding of hooves, freezing winds, ice-shrieks, bone-shaking thunder, the relentless darkness of the Wild Hunt and its throng of the dead. This is perhaps the only way in which Orion is part of a group, being part of this seasonal raid. His singularity, however, is a great strength. Like Mercury, by belonging nowhere, he can go anywhere, if not for long. He is a transitional being, making a mess of tidy boundaries between civilization and the dark wood, between human and animal, between monster-slayer and monster, between hunter and hunted.

The thread running through the entire tradition, from the Babylonian Raven of Adad through the Apolline crow turned black for tale-bearing through the Hermetic talisman against men, daemons, and evil winds, is a particular quality of perception: acute, watchful, morally double, capable of both service and betrayal. The crow sees what others miss and reports it at his peril. Modern cognitive science has given this reputation empirical grounding: the long memory for faces, the foresight that plans across temporal delays, the social intelligence that tracks who saw what and when, the referential gesture offered to a specific partner and no other. These are the capacities that made the crow the natural instrument of the prophetic god, the scout of Odin, the battle-presence of the Mórrígan. Cunning and foresight in the corvid are observed behaviors fundamental to their nature and myth.

Yet, there is more to Orion than his prowess as a hunter— not to, however, minimize the importance of his hunterly aspects. Orion is associated with death and resurrection via his connection to Sah-Osiris. In Ancient Egyptian religion, Sah was a deity associated with a constellation that included the stars of Orion. His consort, Sopdet, known to the Greeks as Sothis, was the goddess linked to the star Sirius. Over time, Sah became identified with the more prominent god of the dead, Osiris, while Sopdet was connected to Isis, Osiris’s consort.

Some notes on working with Antares