Part 8: Stars and Star Myths, Cont.

Mircea Eliade and Sir James Frazer refer occasionally to the shamanistic practice of stuffing bones in a bull’s hide... it must be a terribly efficacious thing to do. What it actually means is anybody’s guess. The Spinning Maiden/Oxherder myth, it should be mentioned, is popular also in Japan. A single ox, however, is neglected by their lovemaking. He wanders around heaven and, curiously, on the 7th day of the 7th Month, poems are written on gaily colored paper... blue, green, red, yellow, and white.. and dispatched to the creature.

Another Japanese myth is often told as a companion piece to the Weaving Maiden’s tale: In the course of a spring day, a fisherman comes upon a girl bathing in a lake. Her clothing, a feathered garment, hangs on a nearby tree. The fisherman snatches the garment and when the girl protests, he refuses to return it to her unless she dances for him. She does the Dance that Makes the Palace of the Moon Turn Round, the dance which, when seen, can make even a poor man understand many mysteries. Then she puts on her feathered garment and flies to heaven. This, we are told, is also a particularly popular Norse myth.

The Oxherder (Ch’ien Niu) is clearly identified as the star Altair located in what, to us, is the constellation Aquila. The Spinning Maiden (Hsu Nu) is the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. That much everyone agrees to. But the Oxherder has an ox and the Spinning Maiden has a loom. And now the problems arise. The Chinese consider the constellation of the Ox to be six stars in Capricorn and the Spinning Maiden’s loom to be four stars in Aquarius. Aquarius? This places Vega (alpha Lyra), the Weaving Maiden, at more than an uncomfortable distance from her loom; and Altair (alpha Aquila), the Oxherder, will need to ride the range in a Ford V8, as the song goes, to round up his ox, at least as these star groupings exist in the twentieth century, anyway.

As Derek Walters pointedly notes in his Chinese Astrology, "...the Ox and the Maiden are two of the most recurrent constellations in Chinese literature, and yet the precise identification of these constellations poses great problems." Walters concludes that these "stars and constellations must have acquired their names at a very ancient date indeed... As they stand at present, the bright stars (Vega and Altair) are out of alignment with their respective constellations which would not have been the case five or six thousand years ago." Maybe. It is much more likely that there is so much confusion about these stars because the myths and the constellations that pertain to them must surely have been introduced at separate times or from different sources.

Maps of the northern hemisphere’s sky for June and July showing the rising of the Summer Triangle with stars Vega and Altair on opposite sides of the Milky Way. Note also the distance between these two stars and the constellations Aquarius and Capricorn.

These two stars do, however, figure prominently in a well known asterism, the Summer Triangle which rises, no surprise here, around what is now the summer solstice. (The third star in the triangle is Deneb in the constellation Cygnus.)

We have mentioned Altair in Aquila, Vega in Lyra, the ox in Capricorn, and the loom in Aquarius. These, of course, are western named constellations and stars. And it might not be a bad idea to talk about what these names mean.

It seems that Zeus was enamored of a handsome young Trojan prince named Ganymedes. Zeus, who was a bull when he rampaged with Europa and a swan when he cozied up to Leda, took on the form of an eagle (Aquila) for this particular amorous ruse. He swooped down and abducted Ganymedes, taking him to Olympus to serve as libation-bearer or water-pourer to the gods. Ganymedes was further rewarded by becoming the constellation Aquarius, the water bearer. Vega’s loom is in Aquarius and Altair is the principal star in Aquila. Just who or what is Altair? Dictionaries will tell you that Al ta-ir is Arabic for "the Star" but the Arabs, who were no astronomical duffers, surely intended to impart significance to any star that they called the star. What do these stars mean when we pair them with spiritual stages?

Zeus as a bull, one of his more famous theriomorphic appearances.

Before turning to the famous rubbing from the stone tablet of the White Cloud Daoist Monastery in Beijing which employs the star myth as an illustrated guide to the alchemical opus, we’ll note that at some point in Buddhist history, subsequent to the birth of Christ, when Buddhism developed its Mahayana branch and perfected the idea of the Bodhisattva Savior, it became fashionable to depict Guan Yin as a kind of Aquarius. He/She holds a willow branch in one hand and in the other, a flask from which pours the "Dew (Ros) of Immortality," as so much amniotic fluid into the uterine enclosure of the Future Buddha Maitreya (Mithras). That this fluid is not merely water but is actually more like an elixir or a transformative and nutritive milk accords well with ancient beliefs that amniotic fluid was, in fact, a nutritious broth which fed the foetus. In the alchemical process, this "dew of life" nourishes the gestating foetus within the spiritual body of the artifex. It is often called "milk from virgin breasts" and is said to flow copiously from the breasts of Artemis (Diana). The sigil for Aquarius (wavy lines) is originally a sign of the Egyptian god of the Nilotic waters, Hapi, son of Horus. Two streams flow from his vessel. Aquarius is not always seen as a male, however.

Tarot card #17, The Star, depicting Aquarius pouring two liquids into the River of Life.

The two sources of liquid are referred to by John Keats in his Endymion:

"Aquarius! to whom King Jove has given     Two liquid pulse-streams     ’stead of feathered wings."                 Book IV,1

One other constellation deserves mention in this section: the now "extinct" constellation Antinous, the eponymous hero who was, according to historical accounts, the self-sacrificing homosexual lover of the Emperor Hadrian. As the story goes, Antinous drowned himself in the River Nile in an effort to preserve Hadrian’s life. The stars that configured his constellation were all located in Aquila.

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