Oleg Zabluda's blog
Sunday, August 19, 2012
 
Diana (=Artemis), the goddess of hunting, was super-pissed at the Orion the hunter.
Diana (=Artemis), the goddess of hunting, was super-pissed at the Orion the hunter.

Diana's daughters (from Atlas), the Pleiades, were slutty, easy to get, and were putting out left and right. Easy virtue. Their mother tolerated it, as long as they were hooking up with gods, but when Orion, the mortal, banged the youngest of the seven sisters, Merope, it was strike one.

Orion was a good hunter, but weak in the head. He boasted he'll hunt and kill every beast. Even if you are not a tree-hugging environmentalist, you'll agree it's idiotic. That Diana would not put up with, and sent a giant Scorpius to teach him a lesson.

Orion was hunting rabbit (Lepus) at the time, when they met face-to-cephalothorax. Orion started shooting arrows from his bow at Scorpius, to no avail, due to chitin exoskeleton. In a fair hand-to-claw unarmed combat, Scorpius picked him up with its giant claws, tossed about, and, finally, crushed. What a wimp. Hercules would bend the Scorpius into a pretzel.

Pleiades asked Asclepius (Эскулап) to resurrect Orion, which he did. Hades was furious, because of the chaos of people zipping in and out of the underworld, and asked his brother Zeus to put an end to it. Zeus killed them all and put onto the sky - Orion, Lepus, Scorpius, Asclepius (Ophiuchus) and his snake (Serpens).

Even after death, Orion was whimpering, being scared of the Scorpius, so Zeus put then on the opposite sides of the sky.

If you look at modern depiction of Scorpius, its claws are fairly small. Clearly, nonsense, from the story above. That's because the Romans, when they realized they need 12 constellations of zodiak, took majestic Scorpius claws and made a constellation Libra from it.

To this day Alpha Librae, called (from Arabic) Zubenelgenubi ("southern claw"), Beta Librae is Zubeneschamali ("northern claw"), and Gamma Librae is  Zubenelakrab, "scorpion's claw", a literal translation of how they were called in Ptolemy's Almagest. He called the whole thing "Scorpius Claws", and so do we, not accepting the "balance scales" abomination.

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