Orion: A Winter Pile of Blood and Muscle
This time of year Orion looms over the trees outside my kitchen window in the evening. If red Betelgeuse doesn’t give him away, his famous belt does. Those three equidistant-appearing stars stand apart from the splatter of shining ones in the dark pelt of the heavens. Orion is probably the most well-known constellation outside of the Big Dipper among the people I know.
I have preferred to spend time with the animals and monsters of the sky. I’d rather throw my face into the fur of The Great Bear or sink to the bottom of the ocean with Cetus the Whale. I’d rather feel the heat of Hydra in my limbs, her body coiled around my heart, squeezing, almost too tight. But as I have said probably too many times, the Sun is my time lord this year and it is teaching me about the importance of crowns and so-called heroes. The Sun is also shining a light where I prefer not to look — in myself especially. While my charts has its share of monster stars, there are the heroes and kings in there too. So I'll be turning my attention to them. The demigods, the humans, the “men.”
Orion stepped forward first. In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense. Orion doesn't belong squarely in either of the categories I've laid out. He lives between.
Orion heaps his wealth on the feasting table in the form of carcasses, fresh and red, organs spilling on the laps of the guests, and there's a smile on his face, victorious. He is remembered, admired even, The Great Hunter, but the people at the feast don’t approve. The sword that hangs so suggestively between his legs cuts in all directions. He can’t tame himself enough to show up the right way. He is too unruly, too uncouth. His boasts get bigger and bigger until they offend the gods. He subdues the wild everywhere but in himself. No matter how skillful he is, no matter how undaunted, he fails to impress the court or stay in the favor of the gods. He is a storm. He is powerful but alone.
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.
Orion is the terror of survival and the insistence upon it, blood-spattered, fists-clenched. In many cultures, his constellation is not of a large hunter in the sky but of the entire hunting scene. His alpha star, the bright Rigel is the hunter and the three stars in a row, the belt, make up the animal. Betelgeuse, the red star, is the arrow that has shot through the prey, flying in the air, bloody. Or sometimes it is the belt is the scene on its own: a hunter, then his dog, and then their prey. In other traditions, the body of Orion is the animal and the three stars are the arrow that has pierced it (Vieria, 2009; Berezkin, 2005).
In the Lunda region of Angola, the Tshokwe people see the hunter’s dog not as a literal dog but a dog spirit called muta (Vieria, 2009). On an ethnographic expedition to the Tchihoko region of northeastern Angola, Jose Redinha recorded that after a successful elephant hunt an elder Kioko hunter faced the constellation of Orion while holding a dog idol, praising the idol in the direction of Orion. Then he threw a handful of glowing red cinders from his fire in the same direction. Vincent Vieria, who retells this story, suggests that perhaps this is in homage to the red Betelgeuse. Dogs are huge for Orion whether they are within his constellation or reference the dogs around him as the constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor.
For me, Orion is a giant upon whose body the entirety of the hunt is portrayed. He is the hunter, the hunted, the hunting dogs, the territory, the awe of the encounter, the violence and fear, the adrenaline, the need, the scarcity, the bloody success, sometimes, perhaps, the honoring of the animal killed, the relief of food and resource, and knowing you will have to do this all again. He is what is sanitized but required. He is outside, trying to get in, trying to find a place and not finding it. He is fury, courage, and undeterred strength. He is withstanding the scarcity of winter, fearsome death and destruction, and traversing the terrain anyway. He is the dying Sun and its return, the loss of our heads and the loss of our sight — and their restoration.
I cannot wait to share more with you. It's actually kind of hard for me not to share more here but it will come. Orion has so many stories attached to him but I'm even more excited to share what I'm learning about his stars. Getting to know individual stars in this constellation has been so rewarding. Expect in upcoming emails: the story of Orion losing his sight and getting it back. Orion and headlessness. Betelgeuse, the red star. Betelgeuse the bloody arrow, the dauntless envoy, the storming one. The relationship between three red stars: Aldebaran, Antares, and Betelgeuse. After Betelgeuse, I'll be moving onto Bellatrix, Alnilam, and Rigel, though I'm not sure in what order yet! Stay tuned.
If the themes of the hunt, sight, winter, death, and storms stirs something up in you, feels eerily familiar somehow, of being both hunter and hunted, of the pursuit within you — check to see if you have any Orion contacts in your chart. You can check to see if you have any planets within 3° of his brightest stars.
For fixed star conjunctions:
Rigel at 16° of Gemini
Bellatrix at 20° of Gemini
Alnilam at 23° of Gemini
Betelgeuse at 28° of Gemini
You don't have to have any planets in Gemini to have stars of Orion in your chart. You may have them by paran. To check your parans (or to learn what parans are), follow this guide from Amaya Rourke on how to look up those up.
It's also possible to feel really drawn to a constellation or a star without it being in your chart. It may be that you have other characters that are tied to Orion who draw him in.
For those of you with fixed star readings with me coming up, I hope this makes you even more excited for your session, whether or not you have stars of Orion. The fixed stars are so thick with story and when they touch the planets in our chart, they change them.
Take heart,
Maeg
References & Resources
Andrews, M. (2004). The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories From Around the World. Victoria: Spinifex.
Aveni, A. (2019). Star Stories. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Berezkin, Y. (2005). The Cosmic Hunt: Variants of a Siberian—North-American Myth. Folklore, v. 31.
Rosenberg, D. (2012). Secrets of the Ancient Skies: Fixed Stars & Constellations of Natal & Mundane Astrology. New York: Ancient Skies Press.
Vieria, V. (2009). The Constellation of Orion and the Cosmic Hunt in Equatorial Africa. Anthropos, Bd. 104, H. 2.
White, G. (2007). Babylonian Star-Lore. London: Solaria Publications.
Wilke, S. R. (1999). Further Mythological Evidence for Ancient Knowledge of Variable Stars. The Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, vol. 27, no. 2
Various ancient Greek sources via the invaluable Theoi.com
Discussions with Sasha Ravitch
Discussions with several kind people on Instagram who volunteered to talk with me about how the stars of Orion show up in their lives. Their accounts will be more front-and-center in the Betelgeuse post that is forthcoming. Accounts for Bellatrix, Alnilam, and Rigel are still being collected.
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Originally written in January 2024