I am interested in finding some reference (poetry, prose, history, mythology) wherein a sailor chooses one of many possible constellations to navigate by. I am acquainted with the astronomical details here, why only particular stars are used for navigation, etc. However, I am not really interested in the practicality of choosing a particular constellation, but rather the mythical dimension of looking at the night sky and choosing one for an emotional, mythical, spiritual reason, etc. Any thoughts?
I recall something about Magellan and his crew seeing the Southern Cross rise up from the horizon as they traveled south. They found some religious meaning in it I think. You might find some writing about that.
Orion is one of the most familiar constellations to those of us in the northern hemisphere. Situated close to Orion, near his feet are two constellations known as Canis Major and Canis Minor (Big Dog and Little Dog). According to myth, these are Orion’s hunting dogs.
One night, coming home late at night, I looked up to see Orion in the sky. The atmosphere was unusually clear and I also saw the dogs. When I say this, I don’t mean that I saw the stars representing the dogs, I mean I saw the dogs. While the major stars provided the shape, background light provided flesh on the bones.
Clearly the unusually good viewing conditions were important here. I also may have been a bit more receptive than usual.
What I took from this experience is that what the ancients were able to see in skies that had no significant air or light pollution is certain to have been much more detailed than we commonly see. Given this, the naming of the constellations may be easier to understand. Particularly if some viewer had a particular story in mind (and I suspect that many of the myths began as stories told around the fire at night), it is easy to imagine that person finding the subject of the story in the sky. Probably something similar to people finding shapes in the clouds.
It has been established that human beings evolved to recognize patterns in disparate things. This would be a survival trait for a primate iving in the jungle. Recognizing a pattern of subtle noises, scents and bird-calls (or lack thereof) might enable that primate to avoid being a leopard’s lunch. This ability to find meaningful patterns shows up in our psychology in various ways. I think it applies here as well.
One point that may or may not be useful for your purposes is that the brightest star in Ursa Minor hasn’t always been the North Star. The position of the North Celestial Pole moves through the sky with a period of about 26,000 years, and sometimes (like now) it’s near an easily-visible star, while sometimes it’s not. The path actually takes it a bit closer to Vega (brightest star in Lyra, and fifth-brightest in the entire sky) than it does to alpha UMi (the star we currently call the North Star), so for sailors at some points in history, it would be most natural to orient by the Lyre, not by the Small Bear.
(Emphasis mine above.) Sorry, but Vega doesn’t get anywhere near as close as Polaris currently is. See here for a chart of where the pole points at various eras. Polaris is the star at the top of the circle near the +2000. Vega is the bright star near the bottom.
Wikipedia says that the closest Vega gets to the pole is about 4 degrees around the year 13700 CE. Not 100% sure if that takes Vega’s proper motion into account, but I think it does. Polaris currently is about half a degree away.
Also, the last time Vega was near the pole was about 12,000 BCE, So it hasn’t been used as such in all recorded history. Polaris has been the pole star for maybe 500 years, but at the beginning of that period it was still a few degrees from the pole. 3000 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians could use Thuban as their pole star. The classical world (500 BCE-500 CE could use the brightest star in the bowl of the Little Dipper, although it wasn’t real close. In between these periods, there were no good pole stars.
As an aside, at a time when Vega was the (approximate) pole star, can you imagine how hard it would be to convince people that the pole star wasn’t the brightest star in the sky? I mean, considering how many people believe that today about even a middling star like alpha UMi.
