Orion (mythology): Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Orion, one of the Titans of Greek mythology, is the archetype of the hunter.

Orion in Mythology

Orion is born in Boeotia, the fertile heart of civilized Hellas, whose folk the Boeotian poet Hesiod described as farmers in the winter and sailors in the summer season. Were the Boeotians such sailors but not swimmers, that they disputed whether Orion waded the Aegean from island to island or merely strode through the waves? Though some say he is sprung directly from Gaia, the Earth Mother, others make his father Gaia's son Atlas, who equally has his great feet planted in the sea.

Others select Poseidon for his father and the beautiful and awful Gorgon Euryale for his mother, the "wide-ranging" one, she of the "wide threshing floor," herself a daughter of Gaia. Such a mother would link Orion to the grain cult, like that other Titan Ephialtes, "son of the threshing floor," who makes a name for himself, together with his "stupid" brother Otos, by piling Mount Ossa upon Pelion in a vain and literal-minded attempt to reach Olympian Artemis and Hera as prizes. They too are "sons" of Poseidon, but the Poseidon in question is not Olympian Poseidon, brother of Zeus, the familiar, trident-wielding sea-god accompanied by nereids and tritons blowing conch shells. The threshing-floor links this Poseidon to the older cereal realm of Demeter and Persephone, the grain mother and her dangerous daughter-self. Scratched notations at the Mycenaean palace-city that Homer called "sandy Pylos," using the Minoan syllabary we call Linear B, record sacrificial goods destined for "the Two Queens and Poseidon" and to "the Two Queens and the King." This is the pre-Olympian role of Posei das, "Lord of the Goddess." But perhaps Orion is older than the grain itself.

His birth in Boeotia is at Hyrai, an ancient place mentioned in Homer's catalogue of the ships that set forth to fetch Helen home from Troy. Ovid in his Fabulae invents a tale of a king "Hyreus," father of Orion, but there was no "Hyraeius" at Hyrai. Like some other archaic names of Greek cities, such as Athens or Mycenae, Hyrai is plural, a name that once had evoked the place of "the sisters of the beehive." Orion's birthplace links him to Potnia, the Minoan-Mycenaean "Mistress" older than Demeter, who might sometimes be called "the pure Mother Bee." Winged, armed with toxin, creators of the fermentable honey, seemingly parthenogenetic in their immortal hive, bees were emblems of other embodiments of the Great Mother: Cybele, Rhea the Earth Mother, and the archaic Artemis as she was honored at Ephesus. Pindar remembered that the Pythian pre-Olympic priestess of Delphi remained "the Delphic bee" long after Apollo had usurped the ancient oracle and shrine. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo acknowledges that Apollo's gift of prophecy first came to him from three bee-maidens.

Bees are universally the most symbolic of insects. In the ancient Near East and throughout the Aegean world, bees were seen as a bridge between the natural world and the underworld. Bees were carved on tombs. The Mycenean tholos tombs even took the form of beehives.

In the wake of scholarship by Robert Graves and Robert Campbell the interpretation of Greek Mythology has placed increasing emphasis on the symbolic and cultural origins of myths. According to this analysis, Orion ("mountain man" if the name is truly Greek) exists on three mythic planes. On the Neolithic level he is a shaman, the "master of the animals," an Aegean counterpart to Enkidu, the wild companion of Sumerian/Babylonian Gilgamesh. On the Minoan level, he is dedicated to the Great Goddess of Crete. On the Classical level, he has become a threat to the reformed and Olympian Artemis and must be destroyed.

According to this school of thought, myths often have renamings and changes, so that "fragmentary" myths represent original myths which had different characters which were subsumed into one story. Orion's episodic presence in mythology lends itself to the interpretation that he was not originally a character from the Indo-European invaders, but was, instead a variation of an earth god who was worked into the mythological corpus.

Orion's first episode, represented as a "marriage," associates him with Side, quite literally the "pomegranate," in a consecration to that aspect of "The Goddess", meaning the original worship figure of the pre-indo European peoples of the Aegean and fertile crescent whose religious icons are found from the Persian Gulf to England. who later evolved into Hera. The union is purely mystical, a civilizing rite for Orion the natural: we hear of no offspring; no place is named where Orion presided as Side's consort. "Side" was simply the Boeotian name for the pomegranate. In other Greek dialects the pomegranate is rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the Earth Goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, was suggestive for the mythographer C. Kerenyi, who cautioned that the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.

The wild pomegranate was not native to the Aegean in Neolithic times. It originated in the Iranian east and came to the Aegean world along the same cultural pathways that brought The Goddess who was worshiped as Cybele in Anatolia and Ishtar in Mesopotamia. Note the similarity of this story to the myth of Persephone, which also figures around the pomegranate. The connection with the underworld myth where the connection with the mother aspect of feminine divinity is told in greatest detail in the Egyptian story of Isis. The pattern of this myth involves the Goddess figure going into the underworld.

There were several "pomegranate" places called Side in the Greek world, though not in Boeotia. One was in the Peloponnese, north of Cape Malea. Another Side, daughter of Taurus, gave her name to a place in Pamphylia, a country only marginally Greek during classical times and now part of modern Turkey. Still another Side committed suicide at her Mother's tomb, to escape advances made by her father. She was transmuted to a pomegranate tree, and he to a kite, emblem of a robber in the Greek mind. Because of the legendary connection, it was said that a kite never landed in a pomegranate tree.

In the sixth century B.C.E. Polycleites took ivory and gold to sculpt the seated Argive Hera in her temple. She held a scepter in one hand and offered a pomegranate, like a royal orb, in the other. "About the pomegranate I must say nothing," whispered the traveller Pausanias in the second century A.D., "for its story is something of a mystery." Indeed, in the Orion story we hear that the Hera cast pomegranate-Side into dim Erebus-- "for daring to rival Hera's beauty", which is the probable point of connection with the older Osiris/Isis story. Since the Orion constellation in the sky was identified as Sah the "soul of Osiris, the identification of this section of the myth is relatively complete. Hera wears, not a wreath nor a tiara nor a diadem, but clearly it is the calyx of the pomegranate that has become her serrated crown. The pomegranate has outlived the Mother Goddess, to turn up in the hand of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary.

What was the Titan Orion, then, before he was transmuted by the pomegranate? Orion, literally "mountain-man," embodies some primeval aspects of untouched nature. Orion finds a parallel in the valiant Enkidu, the opposite/brother and rival-made-friend and helper of Gilgamesh. Orion and Enkidu each began as a shamanic Master of the Animals, surviving from the Neolithic hunt as the Ice Age waned. Like Orion, Enkidu was created by the Mother Goddess.

This legend explains why the constellation Scorpio rises just after Orion begins to set -- the scorpion still chases him, and they never appear in the sky at the same time. Orion's dogs became Sirius, the dog-star. The constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor follow Orion across the sky.

Orion is sometimes said to have had two daughters, Menippe and Metioche.