The music of the spheres : $b A nature lover's astronomyGrondal, Florence Armstrong
Science
The music of the spheres : $b A nature lover's astronomy
Grondal, Florence Armstrong
Astronomy
Ursa Major was not a real bear, however, but a beautiful and most
unfortunate Arcadian nymph, named Callisto, who had been transformed by
Juno, Queen of the Immortals, into this great shaggy creature. Years
afterward, Callisto's son Arcas, then a boy half-grown, met the bear on
a lonely pathway on the mountains and shot an arrow at the creature.
Happily, as was often the way with the gods, Jupiter looked down
just then, stopped the arrow in its flight and changed the young boy
also into a bear. The bears were then raised to the sky and placed among
the stars, for Jupiter straightway:
"Snatched them through the air
In whirlwinds up to heaven and fixed them there."
--_Ovid's Metamorphoses_. (ADDISON'S _Trans_.)
The place is even yet easily located on account of the clearly marked
outlines of the Dippers.
This sympathy on the part of Jupiter aroused Juno to such a jealous rage
that she immediately sought a way to bring discomfort to the Bears,
particularly to the Bear which was Callisto. It seems that the Greeks
believed that the stars enjoyed a dip in the western waves of the ocean
before disappearing to the darkness below the horizon, and seeing in
this a chance for revenge, Juno harnessed up her peacocks and drove to
the palace of Oceanus, the ancient God of the Ocean Stream. Here the
goddess found the Ocean God (who was one of the Titans and ruled before
Neptune's time), and calling him up from the briny depths inveigled that
deity to swear by the river Styx that he would drive the "seven Triones"
away from his "azure waters" every time these stars appeared and never,
under any circumstances, would he share his hospitality with the Bears.
After the long journey from the east across the dimly lighted heavens,
this was a hardship difficult to endure, yet to this day, since a god's
decree may never be changed, the two Bears turn as they approach the
ocean and dare not even linger to sniff the spray. While all the other
constellations immerse their stars beneath the waves, these poor
creatures again ascend the steep slope of the sky and repeat the big
circle about the pole of the heavens with never a rest--nor a bath.
But travelers have quietly observed these stars in a latitude south of
40 degrees, and have noticed, as they approached the equator, that
the Bears slip their feet into the sea and still farther south
"despite of Juno, lave
Their tardy bodies in the boreal wave."
Allen, in "Star Names and Their Meanings," comments on the singularity
that peoples separated by an impassable ocean had like ideas concerning
the resemblance of Ursa Major to a bear.
[Figure 18]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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