Every Ancient Greek Constellation Explained

Today, it's generally accepted

that there are 88 constellations.

The ancient Greeks knew of 48.

They used the stars to navigate,

to plant and sow their crops, to arrange their festivals,

and perhaps most importantly, to come together

and tell their myths and their stories.

The stars were incredibly important to the ancient Greeks.

Of the 48 constellations, the Greeks told their stories

based around eight main groupings.

For example, Orion, the great hunter,

is gathered around a series of animals

and as they gazed up into the sky,

they thought about Orion hunting those animals

and told stories about them.

Or we see Hercules, the great hero and son of Zeus

associated with some of his famous 12 labors.

The other group that was very important to the Greeks

was the story of Andromeda,

the African princess who was rescued by Perseus.

And we see the family of Andromeda projected into the sky.

Today, most of us know the zodiac, the way of animals.

The Babylonians divided the circumference of the heavens

around a 360 degree arc divided into 30 degree sections.

Each 30 degree section had an animal presiding over it.

And each animal represented the time of year

that the zodiac stood for.

The zodiac became an incredibly important way

that the Greeks organized their time.

One of the earliest references to the stars

that we find in Greek literature is right there

in Homer's Odyssey.

Odysseus leaves the island of Calypso

and travels on the open sea to his next stop,

actually the last place he's going to go

until he returns home.

He navigates by the stars in the sky.

And we hear about the big dipper or the plow

and also the star Sirius.

Scholars have argued for centuries

over exactly where Edysseus is going.

And the truth is we really don't know.

But what we have here is a picture

of ancient seafaring and navigation.

You had to navigate by the stars.

What we're looking at today is a view from Ancient Greece.

Many of these constellations we can still see

in the sky today, depending on where you find yourself

in the world.

They just appear at different times.

Let's start with one of the most ancient constellations

the Greeks knew, Orion.

[ethereal music]

The great ancient giant hunter really prominent in the sky.

We identify him primarily through these three stars

in his hunter's belt.

And maybe in Mesopotamia, this was Gilgamesh,

their great hunter character.

It kind of looks like he's holding a bow,

but in some depictions of him, this is a lion's skin

kind of draped from his arm or even a shield.

And then here we can see him holding a club or even a sling,

a hunter's sling, which we know was part of the panoply

of the hunter in the ancient world.

And sometimes there's a sword hanging down here as well,

which can be seen in the star cluster

directly below his belt.

And Orion's sword became a very famous navigational

constellation for the ancient Greeks.

The myths about Orion tell us that he was a massive giant

and he was out of control.

He loved to hunt so much so that he actually started

to deplete the earth of all of its animals.

And Gaia became so enraged with him

that that is the reason why he's lifted from the earth

and turned into a constellation.

He also had a voracious appetite,

including a sexual appetite

and he was struck blind by an ancient king

for attempting to rape his daughter.

His blindness was cured by the rays of light from Helios,

the sun god, and he went on to continue his foray

across the world.

He's also associated closely with Artemis,

who was the goddess of the hunt.

And in some myths, he's even bequeathed to marry her.

Apollo gets very jealous about this.

And in one story, he tricks his sister by challenging her

to see if she could hit an object far away in the sea.

She takes up the challenge, pulls back her bow string,

fires the arrow, hits the object.

She couldn't have known that that was Orion.

Orion's body washes up on the shore.

Artemis sees it and she dissolves into tears

and Orion is killed.

So in some versions of the myth,

it's Artemis who then takes up Orion

and places him in the stars.

In ancient Greece, Orion heralded the start of winter.

He starts to rise and emerge in the late fall

and he becomes most prominent during the winter itself.

Orion is found next to two constellations

that are associated with him, which are his hunting dogs.

Canis Major and Canis Minor.

[ethereal music]

Here we can see Canis Major,

the dog who will always catch his prey.

You can see the actual constellation really resembles a dog.

The key star here is Sirius.

And Sirius is one of the most important stars

that the Greeks knew.

It was so bright in antiquity that you could actually see it

during the day, particularly around mid-summer in August,

which is where we get the term the dog days of summer.

And they actually had a festival called the Skira

where they would send somebody up to the highest point

to look for Sirius and to call out a cry

called the ololygmos, an ululation.

All the women would come out and ululate

to welcome the Dog Star.

And this was a time between the old year and the new year.

It was a time of great heat. It was very arid.

And it was also a time when power changed.

So in Democratic Athens,

it's when the yearly officials passed on their power

from one official to another official.

In Greek tragedy, it's the time when tyrants and kings

are killed and bought down and new ones take over.

We see Sirius the dog star open Aeschylus's Oresteia

Clytemnestra is waiting for Agamemnon to kill him

because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia.

And when Agamemnon comes home and he walks up the red carpet

into his house ready to get into the bath

and then Clytemnestra is going to take a huge sacrificial ax

and strike him three times in the bath,

she calls out to Sirius and asks the dog star

to kind of bless what she's about to do.

So this was a hugely significant star in antiquity.

The irony of these two dogs is, you have a constellation

known for always catching his prey,

chasing prey that will never be caught.

Canis minor is what the Romans called it.

It means small dog, but the Greeks saw it

as the Teumessian Fox,

the creature that can never be caught.

So Orion is imagined with these two hunting dogs

forging across the universe in this futile pursuit.

It's really just a line between two stars,

perhaps these other two stars here

maybe sometimes making a head.

[ethereal music]

Next to Orion is Taurus the bull.

[ethereal music]

Here we can see the face of the bull. It's two great horns.

And the body of the bull, it's such a huge constellation

that we only get half of the body.

One reason for this may be the myth

of the bull from the sea, that Zeus disguises himself

as a bull and carries off Europa into the sea.

The bull is a really kind of significant creature.

It's the largest land animal,

the most expensive animal in Greece to sacrifice

and kill a bull was a huge undertaking.

And so we imagine that Iran here is perhaps wrangling

this bull or trying to bring this bull to heel.

So the bull raging across the universe is a representation

of this idea of the spread of the Greeks.

And Taurus pops up in many myths

associated with the constellation,

including the myths of Heracles

and of course placed as a zodiac symbol.

[ethereal music]

Directly beneath Orion is Lepus the rabbit.

[ethereal music]

There you can see the sort of bunny ears of the hare,

the rabbit if you like, and the tail and the body.

This is another creature associated with Orion,

the huntsman hunting the hare.

A story told about Lepus is that the rabbit was introduced

to a Greek island and bred, as all rabbits do,

to the point where the rabbits were eating the island

out of house and home and they had to be culled.

And Lepus survived and was taken up by the gods

and given to Orion as a creature

that he would eternally hunt.

One of the most frightening constellations

in the Greek sky was Scorpius.

Scorpius is a fantastic constellation.

Here you can see Antares, the pinces of the scorpion,

and then the long body ending in the tail

with Shaula as the stinger.

Orion's prowess as a hunter was so great

that he was depleting the earth of all animals.

Gaia was obviously deeply unhappy about this.

So she created the scorpion to sting Orion and kill him.

And we find this myth quite a lot

of the world pushing back on heroic, mythological,

usually male characters who are just committing

ecological disaster with their prowess.

And we see the universe balancing itself.

So Scorpius is sent to sting Orion, this is another version

of his death, and kill Orion.

And then Gaia takes Orion and puts him up into the heavens

really is a lesson to humanity to live within moderation.

Another constellation in the Southern sky

connected with Orion is Lupus the Wolf.

There we can see the triangle head of the wolf,

the body of the wolf, its tail and its legs.

Wolves are really interesting,

particularly in Greek mythology

because they often represent transformation.

The whole kind of mythological history of the werewolf

we can really trace all the way back to the Greeks

and possibly beyond where we have all kinds of stories

of wolf me and wolf boys.

This may go back far deeper into the Bronze Age

with the Yamnaya, who were these mounted hordes

who came out of Eurasia and Central Europe

and often would spread with maybe their wolf boy hunters

leading the pack.

And possibly this wolf is already been dispatched

or is being sacrificed, which is why it's shown

sort of upside down on its back.

And here's one of my favorite constellations.

This is Centaurus, the Centaur, who's also part

of this Southern Sky winter hunting story.

Centaurs were the mythical half-men, half-horse creatures

who lived in Northern Greece.

They're probably based on the Scythians

who were famous horsemen and horses

were not originally native to Greece.

So obviously pre-Bronze Age

when the Greeks came into contact with mounted warriors,

stories of the centaurs would've emerged.

This is probably Chiron, one of the most famous centaurs.

Chiron is the wise centaur, the teacher of Achilles

and Jason and Asclepius the mortal founder

of healing rituals.

And Chiron himself is a healer.

Sometimes perhaps Chiron is imagined holding a bow.

Often that's given to the other Centaur character,

Sagittarius, who we also find up there

in the constellations.

What's significant about Chiron is Chiron was actually

injured by an arrow of Heracles that was dipped in the blood

of the Hydra, the Hydra being another constellation

of the 48.

The Hydra's blood was poisonous and Chiron being semi-divine

couldn't die from that injury,

but the wound would never heal.

So Chiron has to heal himself,

but the tragedy of Chiron is that he's always in pain,

but he uses that as a way to teach other healers.

Achilles is interesting

because one thinks how is Achilles a healer?

Achilles name actually means he who brings pain to others.

So that's significant that he's kind of educated

in the martial arts by Chiron.

Jason of Jason the Argonauts,

Jason, Jason means healer from the Greek iatros.

And, of course, Asclepius, being the mortal son of Apollo,

he becomes the doctor god, the kind of god of healing.

And he may be encapsulated as well in the stars

as holding the two snakes, his symbol,

a snake wrapped along a staff.

Chiron is by far the most civilized of all the centaurs.

The centaurs are really regard as kind of wild creatures

that live on the fringes of society.

There's a lot of myths about centaurs getting drunk,

ruining weddings, smashing things up, running riot.

Famously, we see a battle between Lapiths,

who are humans and centaurs enshrined

on the Parthenon in Athens.

And here we see a centaur in all his glory.

[ethereal music]

If we move to the northern sky,

we find another great hunter warrior, Heracles,

who the Romans called Hercules.

It's one of my favorite constellations.

There's an enormous amount of mythology

surrounding Hercules.

Here we can see his body.

He's holding a lion's skin or maybe a bow and arrow.

There's his legs running, maybe raised up here as his club.

He again is a great hunter and a warrior.

And of course he's the original lion man,

certainly the original Greek lion man.

The lion man is one of the oldest mythological characters

we found, in fact, the earliest representation of a human

that has been found carved from a mammoth tusk

about this big is actually a lion man figure.

Maybe a lion woman that we can't tell the gender.

But it's certainly a human dressed as a lion

with a lion features and face.

So in a way the lion may one of the original superheroes.

So here is Heracles.

His name means famous to Hera, which is ironic

because Hera, the wife of Zeus and Queen of Olympus,

absolutely detested him.

One of the reasons she detested him

is that Heracles is a lot like Orion.

He's the son of Zeus and a mortal woman

and he has great strength and power and he's arrogant

and he uses that power without any regard for moderation.

He's violent. He's prone to going into a berserk state.

He's gluttonous. He doesn't know how to control himself.

So Hera refuses to let Heracles have a family.

And that's the tragedy of this constellation.

One of the reasons for his famous 12 labors

is that he actually destroys his family.

Hera drives him insane. He destroys his family.

And then he has to go through 12 labors to atone

for the wrongs that he's done.

In other versions of the myth, he completes the 12 labors

and then he destroys his family.

Either way, Heracles is very, very destructive.

But Heracles was a beloved demigod.

He was the only mortal raised up to Olympus to become a god.

And one of the reasons is that Heracles

after destroying his family is actually taken to Athens

by his friend Theseus

and initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries,

which were rites to Demeter and Persephone.

Going through these rites, Heracles learned a new identity.

He set aside his violence and his temper

and his berserk state, joined the community of Athens

and became the true definition of hero,

which in Greek means a protector.

So Heracles worshiped as somebody

who has suffered an enormous amount

and yet come through on the other side

and is seen as a benevolent God.

[ethereal music]

Alongside Heracles in this same group,

we actually see the Hydra, the water snake,

or the water serpent,

this beautiful meandering star pattern

with the head of the snake here.

And the Hydra was the second labor of Heracles.

Heracles is made to undertake 12 labors to atone

for the killing of his family.

The first labor is the slaying of the Nemean Lion.

And of course, Leo, the lion, is one of the constellations

that also appears in the zodiac.

According to the myth, the Hydra was dominating a community

close to where Heracles was born called Lerna.

The Lernaean Hydra was multi-headed.

And when you cut one of its heads off, two grew back.

Heracles had to use a combination of strength

and cunning to defeat the Hydra.

What he did is as he cut off one of the heads,

he cauterized the stump,

allowing another head not to grow back.

However, the main head of the hydra was immortal.

What Heracles did is cut off that head

and bury it under a large rock.

So he didn't kill the hydra,

he basically just encapsulated it.

Some people think that myth is really a myth

about the knowledge of irrigation,

in order to control the waterways around Argos

and bring irrigation to the crops.

And certainly one of the things Heracles does

by going out and completing his labors

is tame the wilderness.

This is another reason why Hera is mad at him

because Hera is an anthropomorphic version of Gaia,

the earth mother.

So she sees him as actually committing

a lot of ecological disaster.

And you also notice two smaller constellations

that are associated with the serpent.

The Crater, which is a drinking cup or a beaker,

and Corvus, the crow.

And even though this doesn't look much like a crow, right,

it's just really a box and also the large cup here,

they represent a story that Apollo sent his bird, the crow,

to fill up his crater, his large cup with fresh water.

And apparently the crow got distracted

by wanting to eat some figs and waited for the figs

to ripen, which obviously took a long time.

And the crow eventually returns.

And as an excuse, the crow says,

The reason I took so long is that this Hydra

was guarding the spring and I couldn't get to it.

And Apollo just sees through the lies

and throws the snake, the crater and the crow

up into the heavens.

And hence we have these three constellations

bought together.

Another serpent associated with Heracles is Draco,

which is the Latin word for dragon.

And there's a relationship between these serpent

snake-like creatures and the idea of a dragon.

These are often chthonic of the earth female protectors

who protect the earth from heroes like Heracles.

Draco emerges in several myths associated

with the constellations, including the guardian

of the golden fleece, which Jason has to retrieve.

But in the Heracles myth, Draco is really important.

The second to last task that Heracles completes

is to go to the far western edge of the world

to the garden of the Hesperides and to recover

the golden apples that are protected by Draco,

this fearsome dragon-like serpent.

These apples were actually a wedding present

from Gaia to Hera.

And Heracles is sent to steal them.

So again, another affront against both Gaia and Hera.

There's no way that even a powerful hero like Heracles

is going to be able to get past Draco.

So he has to get help.

And what he does, he goes to see the great Titan Atlas,

and Atlas holding the world up on his shoulders

and he says to Atlas,

Will you go and get the golden apples for me?

If you retrieve these apples, I'll hold the world for you.

That's the deal.

Atlas is really thankful to be able to get literally

the weight of the world off his shoulders.

So he hands the world to Heracles.

Heracles puts the world on his shoulders.

Atlas goes off to the secret gardens of the Hesperides.

We don't know how he does it,

but he manages to recover the apples.

Whether he takes on Draco

or whether he's such a massive titan that Draco

is no match for him, we don't know.

But he comes back with the apples.

He lays them at the feet of Heracles

and he says, I've done my deal. I'm leaving now.

You have the world, right?

And Heracles says, Okay, fair enough.

But the world is really uncomfortable.

Can I get a pillow to put under my shoulders?

And Atlas has empathy

because obviously he's been carrying the world

and he agrees.

And so he goes to get a pillow.

Heracles says, Here, hold this.

And then he says, Sucker, you've got the world now.

Takes the apples and leaves.

So here you can see Heracles not being particularly heroic,

using trickery in order to achieve his goals.

But nevertheless, he manages to come back

with the golden apples of the asperities.

[ethereal music]

The Greeks also adopted the zodiac,

the way of animals from the Mesopotamian cultures.

The Babylonians and possibly the Sumerians divided the vault

of the universe into a 360 degree circle

with 12 Zodiac symbols each at 30 degrees.

The first was Aries, the ram.

[ethereal music]

Really just a line here, but maybe here the head of the ram

as if the ram is kind of butting through from winter

into the spring,

which is an appropriate time for a ram or a goat.

This was the lambing season,

the times when vegetation was returning to the earth

after the long winter.

It was also a time of festival in ancient Greece.

For example, we have the Festival of Dionysus,

which took place in late March,

which was both a spring festival

and also a festival of music, dance and theater.

So we know about Greek tragedy

and we know that tragedy means song of the goats.

And this is probably related to the goat and ram

and sheep of Aries.

[ethereal music]

The next zodiac symbol is Taurus the bull.

[ethereal music]

It's interesting with Taurus,

we tend to think of the bull as male, right?

It's obviously a sort of male creature,

but also the cow was also often a sacred animal

in Greek mythology.

And Hera, the queen of the gods

is often called cow faced, right?

So Taurus may also be a cow as well as a bull.

And in Egyptian mythology, we have the goddess Hathor,

and she's shown with a cow's face and these long horns

often with the kind of Eye of Ra in between the two horns.

So this is a very common symbol in mythology,

both a powerful cow and a powerful bull.

If it is a male bull and probably is in terms of the zodiac

that is the most powerful land animal,

the most expensive land animal in ancient Greece.

It's hard to raise cattle on the Greek landscape.

It's not a great landscape for kind of arable farming.

So if you did own a bull,

that was a very, very expensive item.

And if you sacrificed the bull, that was significant.

So we get a lot of myths about Zeus

coming as a bull, carrying off maidens as a bull,

Europa and Io traveling the world as a bull.

So Taurus is a very significant Zodiac creature.

[ethereal music]

The next Zodiac symbol is Gemini, the celestial twins.

[ethereal music]

Castor and Pollux.

They were the brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra.

Now, we know the story that Zeus comes to Leda,

the queen of Sparta, disguised as a swan

and he makes love to her as a swan.

Go with me here.

And on the same night, she makes love

to her husband, Tyndareus.

And out of that come four children.

Two are descended from Zeus

and two are descended from Tyndareus.

Of the girls, the one descended from Tyndareus

is Clytemnestra who marries Agamemnon.

The one descended from Zeus is Helen,

who of course becomes Helen of Troy.

From the brothers, we have Castor and Pollux.

The myths get confused about which brother is descended

from Zeus and which brother is not.

But really the story is beautiful.

The mortal brother dies and the immortal brother

gives up his immortality so his brother can live.

And then they decide to swap each day.

One day one brother is immortal and one brother is mortal.

The next day they swap.

So here we see the two celestial twins joined hand in hand

sharing that divinity and placed up in the stars.

Next, we find cancer, the crab.

[ethereal music]

There you can see the long pincers of the crab,

the two eyes of the crab made up by these stars

and the crab's body.

The crab is associated with the myth of Heracles

that when Heracles was battling the Lernaean Hydra,

Hera sent a crab to nip at his toes and distract him.

Heracles has no problem dealing with the crab.

Either he kind of stamps on it

or he brings his club down on it and he smashes the crab.

Hera feels sorry for the crab.

So she takes it and she turns it into a constellation.

[ethereal music]

Next Leo, the great lion.

Here we can see the constellation with the body of the lion,

its head and mane and its hindquarters.

The lion is associated with several myths,

but in particular the myths of Heracles.

Heracles becomes the essential lion man.

His first labor is to defeat the lion of Nemea,

who's ravaging the countryside just to the north

of where Heracles is from.

But the Nemean Lion has an impenetrable hide

and Heracles' arrows and club glance off it.

So he's forced to wrestle the lion

and actually choke the lion.

And then he has a problem.

How does he get the lion's skin from the lion?

He actually uses the claws of the Namean lion

to cut the lion's skin off

and then he wears that lion skin as his protective shield.

It's also the representation of Heracles' status

as a berserker.

Berserkers tend to be therianthropic.

which means they turn into animals.

So you can think of berserker as a Norse word,

meaning bear man.

So you can think of the Vikings

who some of them went into battle naked with a bear skin.

And here you can see Heracles taking the lion

and wearing it as his status as a berserker.

So Leo the lion is a really important constellation

in the world of Greek myth.

And lions were also at one point pre-Bronze Age

indigenous to Greece as well.

[ethereal music]

Next we have Virgo, Parthenos or the Virgin.

Here you can see the body of Virgo, her legs,

and her arms held up into the air.

This was a significant constellation

because it would rise September, October around the time

of the secret Eleusinian mysteries.

We don't really know what happened

at the Eleusinian mysteries because if you revealed them

it was on pain of death.

But you know, up to about a quarter of the population

of Athens were initiated into the mysteries

and many famous people, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles,

Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar,

were all initiates of the mysteries.

And we think the culmination of the mysteries

was that Demeter appeared to you.

And it may have been this constellation

that actually appeared in the very dark sky

in September, October.

And certainly this key star here, Spica,

which means germ of wheat was also significant

because we believe that the initiates

after this huge nine-day ceremony were shown

an ear of wheat as this sort of idea

of perhaps celestial reincarnation

or the secrets of agriculture or the gift of agriculture

from Demeter to humanity.

So this may actually be Demeter or Persephone

appearing in the sky.

We know this now as Virgo.

The next constellation is Libra, the scales.

And in a way, the equilibrium of this constellation

invokes scales for the Greeks.

Scales are really important in antiquity

because obviously it was the way that you weighed goods

or products, but also the Greeks saw scales

as something that weighed souls.

Something that kind of bought an idea of justice

that your life was weighed on these great scales

and you could, you know, the good and the bad

lay next to each other.

So the scales are really important

for concepts of leading a good life.

[ethereal music]

Next in the zodiac is Scorpio, the scorpion.

Sent by Gaia to defeat Orion.

Orion boasts that he's going to rid the world

of all animals.

He's such a great hunter and Gaia's not having it.

So she creates the scorpion and sends it against Orion

and the great giant hunter

is felled by the sting of the scorpion.

This astrological symbol reminds us do not mess with Gaia.

[ethereal music]

Next is Sagittarius, the archer.

Here you can see the body of possibly another centaur

holding a bow.

You can see the bow here and the arrow

with the tail of the centaur going off into the distance.

Archery is an interesting concept for the ancient Greeks.

Obviously bowmen are important in Greek mythology.

Heracles has a great bow that never misses.

We also meet the archer Teucer, who is a half Greek,

half Phrygian, who fights with his half brother Ajax

at Troy.

And here we can see Sagittarius pulling back that bow

and firing actually on Scorpius.

But by and large, they regarded archery as dirty fighting

like a sniper.

They wanted to be infantrymen or cavalryman

and fight close quarter.

Of course, Achilles, the greatest infantryman of all,

is bought down by an arrow fired into his ankle.

So we do see a lot of bows,

a lot of arrows in ancient mythology.

And the centaurs were known to be a great bowman.

Now it may be that the centaurs were derived

from the first contact between the Greeks and the Scythians.

The Scythians were great horsemen and horse women

and they were known to shoot forward and back

from horseback.

And Sagittarius may be a representation of that contact

with the ferocious Scythians.

[ethereal music]

Next in the zodiac is Capricorn,

the goat with the tail of a fish.

Here you can see the large triangle is the body of the goat

with the goat horns and there you can see the tail

turning into a fish.

Hybrid animals are very popular in Greek mythology.

We can think of the Chimera, for example.

And here we can see Capricorn who may be the embodiment

of the goat god Pan fleeing from the monster Typhon

and jumping into the sea

as if he transforms into a sea creature

in order to avoid Typhon and being pursued

by that great titan.

[ethereal music]

Next is Aquarius, the water carrier.

And we imagine that the central line of stars

is Aquarius's body and he's lifting up a water jug

and pouring the water down.

And for the Greeks, Aquarius was probably Ganymede,

the cup bearer of Zeus.

Ganymede is a beautiful young man

and Zeus wants him by his side

so he transforms into an eagle or he sends his eagle.

That's the constellation of Aquila down to earth

to grab Ganymede and pull him up to heaven

whether he likes it or not.

And Ganymede becomes the cup bearer of Zeus.

And here he is pouring out his celestial water.

Next is Pisces, the twin fish.

Here you can see the head of the fish

and their scaly bodies connected together.

The myth of these fish actually comes from the Syrians.

The fish helped protect the goddess of fertility,

hiding her in the river.

And as a result, we're told that the Syrians regarded fish

as sacred and refused to eat them.

[ethereal music]

One of the most compelling group of constellations

in the northern sky told the myth of Andromeda,

who shown laying across the Southern sky

with her arm up chained to a rock.

Andromeda is a princess of Ethiopia

and the Ethiopians are under a curse by Poseidon.

He has flooded their community

and the only way that they can make the waters recede

is to offer a sacrifice.

So Andromeda is stripped naked

and tied up to this great rock on a cliff

and is about to be devoured by a great sea monster

called Cetus.

[ethereal music]

This is an incredible constellation

because it really does look like the Loch Ness monster.

This kind of huge long dinosaur-like body

with this long neck and this kind of ugly head

and these horns.

Cetus is also called the whale

and is just any large, massive, frightening sea creature

that appears in the Andromeda myth.

Luckily, the Greek hero Perseus is on his way home

having decapitated Medusa, the Gorgon.

And next to Andromeda, we actually see Pegasus,

which is the winged horse that Perseus rides.

Pegasus emerged from the decapitated neck of Medusa

when Perseus cut off her head.

And Pegasus is a divine creature

because he is the offspring of both Medusa and Poseidon.

Poseidon is the god of the sea,

but he's known as the earth shaker

and he's depicted riding horses.

So the idea of an earthquake is that Poseidon

is thundering across the seabed

and causing the earth to shake.

So it's fitting that one of his offspring would be a horse.

Perseus is depicted riding this horse and swoops in

and sees what's going on with Andromeda.

And this is one of our earliest Greek love stories.

He falls instantly in love with Andromeda.

He doesn't care about why she's being sacrificed.

And in some versions of the myth, he takes out the head

of Medusa, which we know petrifies anybody who looks at her,

holds it up and turns Cetus, this great sea monster,

into a rock.

He then takes Andromeda and makes Andromeda his wife.

Above Andromeda, those cluster of bright stars

is Cassiopeia.

Cassiopeia is the mother of Andromeda

who consented to her sacrifice

and she's depicted in the constellations

as if seated on a throne constantly spinning

as a punishment.

In some versions of the Cassiopeia myth,

she's said to be eternally looking at her reflection

in a mirror.

One of the reasons why she was punished is she claimed

her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the gods.

Here we can see Cepheus

where we see a triangle associated with a box.

This is the body of King Cepheus anchored to a throne.

And he too is in this eternal spinning

as a punishment for his arrogance.

Perseus marries Andromeda. They go back and live in Greece.

He recovers his kingdom.

He sets up a home in the region of Argos

and they become the ancestors of Heracles.

In this depiction of Perseus,

we may actually be seeing his winged shoes that are given

to him by Hermes in order for him to fly across the universe

and go to the ends of the world to the layer of the Gorgons

and find Medusa.

He's also given a cap of invisibility

and a highly polished shield which acts as a mirror,

which enables him to land his blow

without actually looking at the face of Medusa.

Medusa is an interesting character

because many Greek warriors

actually painted the face of Medusa on their shields.

Also, we see the face of Medusa in drinking cups.

Greek wine was very thick and heavy,

so you wouldn't see Medusa until you drank the wine

and then the head of Medusa would be staring back at you

as you got progressively more and more drunk.

So Medusa becomes a really popular image in Greek art,

but she really is a symbol of the power of goddesses

to turn you to stone to petrify you

unless you treat them with respect.

[ethereal music]

In the northern sky were a series of constellations

that were incredibly important to the Greeks,

particularly for navigation.

We see here the great bear, Ursa Major.

And next to it, Ursa Minor, the little bear.

These are very distinctive constellation

because they contain the big dipper or the plow

and the little dipper, which of course has the polestar.

So this was essential for navigation today

and in the ancient world.

There's various myths associated with these two bears.

One of them which I think is significant

is that they're regarded as the nurse maids

who took care of Zeus

when he was hidden from his father, Chronos.

Chronos received the prophecy that he would be overthrown

by one of his divine children as he himself

overthrew his own father Ouranos.

So he decided to basically devour his children and eat them.

His wife Rhea, distraught,

took the last of her children's Zeus, the youngest child,

and hid him in the Ideon cave in Crete.

And instead she took a rock,

wrapped it in swaddling clothes, fed that to Chronos

and Chronos swallowed that rock.

Ultimately he would vomit up that rock.

That rock would fall to the earth, land at Delphi

and become what's called the Omphalos stone,

which is the center of the world at Apollo Shrine at Delphi.

And then that would release all the other gods

who would eventually overthrow Chronos.

As for Zeus, these two bear figures

who are sort of nurse maids to Zeus,

they organize the curates who are these bronze clad warriors

to sing and dance and clash their weapons

and clash symbols in order to cover the sound

of the baby crying and protect Zeus,

to allow Zeus not to be devoured by Chronos.

[ethereal music]

Next to the two plows is the plowman Bootes.

[ethereal music]

Actually, there's the handle of the big dipper

known as the plow in many cultures.

And over here is Bootes who is the plow man.

Here we can see the body of Bootes, the plowman

and either his feet or perhaps he's pushing the plow itself.

This too was a really significant constellation.

We hear about this constellation in The Odyssey

and in Hesiod back in the seventh century BCE.

So we knew that the Greeks knew it. They navigated by it,

and also it was the sign to plow usually in the late fall.

Also in this group, we see the Corona Borealis.

This is the northern crown or what the ancient Greeks

called the Stefanos, which meant a wreath.

There's actually two crowns, both called Stefanoi in Greek,

which means crown or wreath.

But this one is regarded as the crown of Ariadne,

when she becomes Queen of Argos.

Some ancient writers connected that wreath

with what the followers of Dionysus

would wear on their heads.

Dionysus was the god of wine and the mask and ecstasy.

And following Dionysus was to step out

of your normal day-to-day and literally party or watch

the theater or dance or sing.

And being wrapped in a myrtle wreath

was a sign that you were a follower of that god.

One of the largest constellations in the sky

was the Argo Navis.

Here we can see the prow of the ship known as Puppis,

the body of the ship next to it.

And Vela is the sail

where we see the ship being blown across the universe.

This is associated with the Argo,

which is the famous ship built for Jason and the Argonauts,

the travelers on the Argo in their search

for the golden fleece.

Jason is another heroic character

who must go on a quest in order to reclaim

his rightful place as a ruler of a Greek community.

And he sails the Argo to the fringes of the Greek world

through the Black Sea to the ancient kingdom of Colchis,

where he too must face a great Draco figure

who is protecting the golden fleece.

He's unable to do this alone.

So he gains the help of the Princess Medea,

who is a native of Colchis.

Medea is known for extensive knowledge of pharmacology,

poisons, plants, healing.

In fact, our term medical is associated with the word medea.

It means fore thinker or somebody who plans.

Jason clearly needs this help.

In some versions of the myth, he's actually swallowed

by Draco and Medea lulls it to sleep.

In other versions, they rub an ointment on Draco,

which also makes the snake fall asleep,

enabling Jason to take the golden fleece and return

on the Argo back to Greece.

This is a huge constellation.

The Argo also in some versions of the story

contains a figurehead to Hera,

and Hera actually helps Jason in recovering

the golden fleece.

And he brings back from Colchis, Medea.

According to one version,

Medea has brought her young brother with her.

And in order to slow down her father,

she kills her brother, cuts his body up into pieces,

throws it across the prow of the ship.

And then her father has to stop and recover the pieces

of his son.

And this allows the Argo to sail away.

So here we see the Argo plowing through the universe.

[ethereal music]

A small constellation connected to the myth of Jason,

is Lyra, the liar.

[ethereal music]

This is the instrument of Orpheus,

who was one of the argonauts aboard the Argo.

And Orpheus was said to be able to charm anybody,

including the gods with the sound of the lyre

and his singing voice.

The lyre is important.

That's where we get the word lyric from.

The Greeks regarded music as having the ability

to charm the soul, including the souls of the gods.

And so the famous story of Orpheus

is that on his wedding day, his wife, Eurydice dies.

And so Orpheus goes down into the underworld

and charms Hades with his beautiful singing

and the strumming of his lyre to the point

where Hades agrees to let Eurydice go back to earth

with Orpheus on the condition that Orpheus trusts

that Eurydice is behind him and doesn't look back.

Orpheus can't resist checking that Eurydice is behind him.

He catches a glance and at that moment

Eurydice is pulled back into the underworld.

Orpheus then goes on to sing his song

across the Greek world.

Ultimately, he is destroyed by the followers of Dionysus,

the maenads, who tear him apart, cut off his head,

throw it into the sea, but the head keeps on singing.

[ethereal music]

Also in the northern sky,

we see one of my favorite constellations, Ophiuchus.

Ophiuchus is the serpent handler.

The Greeks probably saw this figure as Asclepius.

Asclepius is the mortal son of Apollo.

He becomes the founder of the cult of Asclepius,

which is a healing cult,

which actually spread throughout Greece

from the fifth century onwards and becomes really

a dominant form that the Greeks found healing

through these Asclepieia, which are really hospitals.

And actually the Hippocratic Corpus

where kind of modern Western medicine is developed from.

All of the Hippocratic writers were priests of Asclepius.

They were healers.

When you went for treatment at one of these hospitals,

you actually had to practice something called incubation,

which is you went to sleep in the sanctuary

and then you were sort of visited by these serpents

and they would give you dreams

and then you woke from the sleep

and the priests would interpret your dream

and then they would do the surgery

or then they would do whatever you need.

And apparently this was a very effective way

of curing people, both the mind and the body.

The snake was seen as a symbol of life and death.

It would shed its skin and yet survive.

It lived beneath the earth and on the earth.

So picking up a snake and holding it away from the earth

is a sense that you've restored life.

And this is what a Asclepius was famous for.

He actually did bring a dead person back to life.

He was punished for that by Zeus,

but he was followed by an enormous amount

of real doctors in the ancient world.

And his healing sanctuaries, the Asklepieions,

were all over the Greek world.

And here we see Serpens, an individual constellation,

but also part of the constellation of Ophiuchus,

the snake handler, or Asclepius holding his snake

above the earth.

Adjacent to Centaurus is Ara, the altar.

[ethereal music]

And above Ara, you can see Lupus.

Some of the stories of Ira is that the centaur,

possibly Chiron, is holding the wolf Lupus

and sacrificing it over the altar to the gods.

Altars are incredibly important in both Greek

and Roman mythology, but also real cult practice.

To sacrifice an animal on an altar

is to communicate with the gods.

Hesiod tells us a really great story about an altar

which is the Prometheus, the Titan.

He told humans, when you kill an animal,

you need to trick Zeus.

And what you need to do is butcher the animal,

take all the meat and put it on one side in a pile,

but make it kind of look unruly.

And then take all the parts of the animal

you're not going to eat, the splanchna,

which is a great Greek word for guts and the bones

and sew it all back up in a skin,

kind of resurrect the animal if you like,

and put that on one side.

Then ask Zeus, what do you want?

You want this reconstituted animal

or you want this horrible pile of flesh?

And Zeus picks the reconstituted animal,

which is why you burn those parts

and send that up as a sacrifice to the gods.

Now, of course, this makes sense, right?

Because if you're going to butcher an animal,

you've got to get rid of the body parts.

If you leave them lying around,

everybody's going to get sick.

So this is a great aetiological myth explaining

and justifying why the humans are getting the good stuff

and they're kind of burning all the crap

and sending that to the gods.

But nevertheless, without sacrifice,

the gods are not worshiped.

So this is a really, really important part

of ancient culture.

So the Ara is an important constellation

reminding the Greeks of their relationship with the divine.

Of course, occasionally the Ara,

the altar is used for human sacrifice.

And the question is did the Greeks ever practice

human sacrifice?

We'd like to think not,

but maybe now there's some archeological evidence

from the Peloponnese that perhaps they may have done

in certain situations.

The jury's still out on this,

but we should be open to the fact that occasionally

it may have happened.

We certainly have an enormous amount of myths

about human sacrifice.

When Achilles is cremated, they take 12 Trojan boys,

slit their throats and burn them on the pyre

alongside Achilles.

And of course, the Trojan War itself is launched

because Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter on an altar

face down like a sacrificial goat and slits her throat

and allows the blood to fall onto the altar.

And this basically gives them favorable winds

to send the fleet upon Troy.

So the altar can also be a very negative symbol as well

and remind the Greeks of some of these negative myths

of human sacrifice.

[ethereal music]

And here connected with the theme of water is Eridanus,

the Great River.

[ethereal music]

And there you can see the river

meandering through the cosmos.

There's a fascinating myth associated with Eridanus,

which is that Phaethon, who is the son of Helios,

desperately wants to drive his father's chariot

across the sky.

This is the chariot of the sun

that brings the sun to mortals.

And Helios is like, You're not ready to drive this chariot.

You can't handle it.

So obviously like any teenage boy,

he waits till his dad's not around

and he gets in the chariot and he tries to drive it.

And the horses of the sun recognize that this kid

does not know what they're doing.

So they buck and they take him on this wild, crazy ride

and he scorches the earth.

And eventually they end up flipping him out of the chariot

and he falls headlong into this river

and the river itself is scorched.

And this is what we see here.

[ethereal music]

Here is Piscis Austrinus, the big fish.

[ethereal music]

Really the parent of Pisces,

also connected with that same Syrian story

of protecting the fertility goddess.

That's the big fish.

[ethereal music]

A distinctive northern constellation is Cygnus,

the great swan.

There you can see the wing span of Cygnus,

going up to its beak and its tail.

We immediately think of Zeus coming as a swan to Leda

and producing the famous egg.

Also, the swan is the bird most closely associated

with Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love.

So the swan is a symbol of eroticism

and the power of erotic love.

[ethereal music]

A very important bird astrological sign

was Aquila, the eagle.

[ethereal music]

There you can see the large wingspan of the eagle,

the head of the eagle, either side of the star alter

and the eagle's tail.

And this is the sacred bird of Zeus.

Zeus often transforms into an eagle.

It also becomes the imperial symbol of Rome.

We can think of the Roman legions

who each of them had a golden eagle,

which was their sacred divine symbol.

And their greatest warrior would be the aquilifer.

He would be the one to hold the Aquila.

And interestingly enough, he would be dressed as a lion man

or a bear warrior protecting that symbol.

If he went down in battle, that was of great disgrace

to the legion and the legion was decimated.

One man in 10 was put to death.

Julius Caesar tells a story

that when he invaded Britain the first time,

his battle hardened troops did not want to get off the ship

because the Britains were pretty much covered

in kind of blue paint naked and screaming

and they just didn't want to deal with them.

And the aquifer jumped into the Icy English Channel

and strode into the battle.

And the rest of the men knew they had to go with him,

otherwise they would be decimated.

So the eagle is a really, really powerful symbol.

Of course, it's the symbol of the United States, right?

So it's still with us today.

Ovid, the great Roman writer who wrote his book,

Metamorphoses was fascinated by the idea

of human animal transformation

and divine animal transformation.

So many of these constellations tell those stories.

A small but important constellation

is Delphinus, the dolphin.

[ethereal music]

There you can see the dolphin shape of its tail.

The dolphin is associated with Dionysus

because they tended to surround Greek ships

and seem like a chorus.

Also, we see monuments to Dionysus

with humans jumping into the water, turning into dolphins.

One of the most famous dolphins is the dolphin

that rescued the poet Orion,

who is captured by pirates and sings a song

that calls the dolphin,

then jumps into the sea and rides on the back of a dolphin

and is delivered to safety.

And then he's able to meet up with the pirates

and indict them for his crime and they're punished.

Dionysus also saved by dolphins

when he too was captured by pirates.

He turns the pirate ship into a vine, leaps into the sea

and the dolphins protect him.

[ethereal music]

This is Auriga, the Charioteer.

This constellation was most closely associated

by the Athenians, by the Greeks with Erichthonius

Erichthonius was said to invent the chariot.

He is regarded as the son of Hephaestus,

who's the god of the forge and the god of technology

and Athena.

Now, how can Athena have a son if Athena is Parthenos,

the celestial virgin?

Well, the story is told that Hephaestus is pursuing Athena.

Athena's kind of ignoring him.

She happens to be flying over Athens.

At that moment, Hephaestus can't control himself anymore.

He ejaculates, his celestial sperm

glances off the thigh of Athena.

Athena disgusted, takes some wool from Athens,

wipes off the sperm, throws it onto the ground.

And this is what produces Erichthonius of the earth.

And this is how the Athenians claim

some kind of descent from the virgin goddess herself.

And within this constellation,

this idea of the charioteer is that through his connection

with Hephaestus, he creates the first ever chariot.

[ethereal music]

Here we see Triangulum, the triangle.

[ethereal music]

The triangle was a sacred object to the Greeks.

They based a lot of their architectural temple building

on the triangle itself.

So the triangle in the sky is a nod towards the sacredness

of the triangle in Greek cultural and religious life.

[ethereal music]

Here we see Equuleus, the little horse,

which is a horse's head in the sky.

This is the sort of face of a horse emerging,

possibly the sibling of Pegasus.

[ethereal music]

Here we see the southern crown,

you can see the arc of those bright stars.

This is Corona Australis.

Mythologically, this is associated

with the crown of Dionysus.

[ethereal music]

And here you can see Sagitta, the arrow

dashing across the universe.

We can see it here very clear these three stars

and these two stars here making up the feathers

of the arrow.

The arrow is kind of going in a different direction,

but we might want to think of the arrow

as maybe the arrow that Heracles fires on the eagles

or the vultures who are pecking out the liver

every day of Prometheus.

Prometheus is a titan who basically

gives the gift of fire to humanity.

This is really what sets humanity on the road to technology.

And Zeus is furious, right?

Because Zeus controls fire, that's his thunderbolt.

And Prometheus has given this to the humans

because he wants to create some balance

between humanity and the gods.

So Zeus takes Prometheus and chains him to a rock

and every day an eagle comes and pecks out his liver

and every day the liver grows back.

The next day the eagle comes.

And Heracles is said to free Prometheus

by shooting his arrow at the eagle.

I mean, here the arrow is kind of missing.

It's, it's in such close proximity to Aquila

that it definitely makes...

It made ancient minds think about that story.

Well, Heracles may have freed Prometheus,

but I guess Zeus had the last laugh

because he's now concerned that humans

have got the technology that's going to turn them into gods.

So Hesiod tells the story that the gods

create the first woman, Pandora,

and they create her to basically distract the men

from doing anything valuable with their lives.

It's a pretty sexist, misogynistic story.

And it was probably told to a kind of all male crowd

back in the seventh century BC,

but it gives us the sense that the Pandora,

the all giving is sent to humanity

to actually balance things and stop them from taking fire

and taking over Olympus.

So these 48 constellations are not all the constellations

that we see in the sky today.

NASA now recognizes 88,

but these 48 were the most prominent ones

known to the Greeks, cataloged by ancient writers,

particularly Ptolemy, that have come down to us

and are almost certainly based on

much more ancient Mesopotamian system of astrology.

So they were significant.

We hear about many of them in in Greek texts

and we know that the Greeks navigated by them,

they paced their rituals to them, they planted,

plowed by them, they were significant.

And if one thinks about the Greek world at night,

there was no light pollution at all.

So you would see these constellations

really bright in the sky.

They were really significant and important.

And particularly if you were sailing,

if you wanted to cross a large body of water,

which was very dangerous,

your only hope of getting where you needed to go

was to trust the stars in the sky.

There's a wonderful opening to a play

called The Agamemnon when a watchman on the roof

of the house of Atreus looks up at the sky and says,

How well I've come to know night's congregation of stars.

And he calls them the blazing monarchs of the sky.

And then he says, Those that bring winter

and those that bring summer to us mortals,

I know just when they rise and when they set.

So clearly the Greeks knew the way the stars moved

probably way better than we do,

and they govern their lives by them.

Also, we find philosophers like Plato,

seeing the stars as a reflection of humanity.

He believed that if you led a good life,

there was a parallel star for you up there in the universe

and that you became that star

and then you could be reincarnated again

as a human back on earth.

So there was this sort of reciprocity between you on earth

and the stars in the sky.

So they were the natural order of things.

They were the pulse of the world. They were the heavens.

The Milky Way, which could be seen really clearly at night,

was seen as a way up into the realm of the gods.

There's no way you could ignore them

and they were of great importance to all ancient peoples.

[bright music]