Deb, thank you! I hope your presentation went well. Is it now on-line?

Hamlet's Mill is pretty tough sledding, but it makes a good case for so much of the world's mythology as metaphor for different societies' attempts to describe the heavens; notably the seeming rotation of the heavens around a center pivot-point.

On another (didactic) note, a bunch of star-lore in ancient sources really doesn't deal with human character or cultural events, but with weather prediction. Today's meteorological astrology might come close, but the ancients seemed more to rely on the rising and setting of fixed stars. I think this ties into the Mediterranean and Near East agriculture as linked to seasonally variable water availability: the Nile and Tigris/Euphrates floods, or the onset and end of the rainy season. As I think everyone knows, it doesn't rain at all in a Mediterranean summer, so farmers had to rely upon the rains falling from late autumn through early spring for their crops. Egypt gets hardly any precipitation at all.

I find it so intriguing to think of the heavens as a vast calendar; something we moderns neglect.

Orion is a specially interesting constellation, because he is linked to several pre-Islam Near Eastern gods, in addition to the Egyptian ones. Archaeological finds in the eastern Mediterranean of "the god with the upraised arm" show a distinct similarity between gods like Ba'al and Haddad to Orion. See: http://www.dailygrail.com/features/god- ... raised-arm . Some verses in the biblical book of Isaiah get really dicey, in which God Himself appears to be depicted as Orion.

This gets us to the notion of a sky deity who rewards or punishes people by sending or withholding the crucial winter rains. Orion is a winter constellation in the northern hemisphere. It was not a good thing for ancient Mediterranean farmers to see too much of Orion in the winter, because this meant the skies were clear and rainless. Then the upraised arm might be seen as punitive.

I think this also explains the ancient Jews' horror of idol worship as practiced by their neighbours (and Jewish apostates), because hand-made "graven images" could not possibly control the weather. The constellation Orion or its Creator just might.

Mark wrote:
If one accepted your view any star of the nature for example Mars would be completely interchangeable. For example, both Aldebaran (In the constellation of Taurus) and Pollux ( in the constellation of Gemini) are both described as stars of the nature of Mars by Ptolemy.

I did not tell that all the stars with the same nature are interchangeable.

It depends. Some have their peculiar meaning, which is listed in whatever traditional astrological manual.
Others not, in fact they are not mentioned anywhere.

The ones mentioned by Firmicus and Manilius are just those RISING (or in longitude with the Ascendant maybe) in the authors mind, they used just that way, the rest is a modern addition in my way of thinking.

margherita

I did not tell that all the stars with the same nature are interchangeable.

Ok. My misunderstanding.

It depends. Some have their peculiar meaning, which is listed in whatever traditional astrological manual. Others not, in fact they are not mentioned anywhere.

Agreed.

The ones mentioned by Firmicus and Manilius are just those RISING (or in longitude with the Ascendant maybe) in the authors mind, they used just that way, the rest is a modern addition in my way of thinking.

Even then though the use of paranatellonta had variations. Manilius just uses the whole constellation much of the time. This mirrors the approach of Aratus. If I recall right Firmicus ( and others such as Anonymous of 379 and Liber Hermetis) break the constellations down by degree and individual bright stars. This is probably a legacy of Ptolemy and his more precise focus on the 30 bright stars in his Handy Tables and Phases of The Fixed stars which allowed more exact calculation of star positions throughout the 7 climes. Then there is Teucer of Babylon and Vettius Valens who seem to split the constellations into three 10 degree segments aligned to the each zodiac sign. This approach was later replaced by the system of planetary decans. These variations may reflect growing astronomical sophistication i.e. from whole constellation, 10 degree segment to single degree calculations for stars.

Mark