As a young man Orion courted Merope, one of the Pleiades, seven nymphs who were companions of the Greek goddess Artemis (the others were Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Sterope, and Taygete). Merope rejected his advances. In one story, she married a mortal, Sisyphus, king of Corinth. According to another version, Merope became betrothed to Orion, but her father—Oenopion, king of Chios, an island in the Aegean Sea—kept postponing the
The Australian Pleiades
The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have their own myth of the creation of the Pleiades and Orion, which are visible in the southern hemisphere during Australia's winter months. The Pleiades were seven beautiful sisters who roamed the land during the day and returned to their sky home at night. A man named Wurrunnah captured two of them but discovered that their beautiful hair was like icicles. He tried to melt the sisters' cold crystals over his campfire; the water put out his fire and dimmed the sisters' brightness (thus accounting for the two dimmest stars of the Pleiades). During their captivity, many men admired the sisters, but Berai Berai (two brothers) honored them most. They hunted for food for the sisters but knew that they longed for their home in the sky. Each night, their five sisters twinkled, beckoning them. One day Wurrunnah told the sisters to gather pine bark from a tree. As they began, the pine tree extended itself to the sky, and the sisters escaped home. Berai Berai laid aside their weapons and mourned until death's shadow overtook them. The fairies then placed Berai Berai in the sky, where they could always hear the sisters singing; the brothers became Orion's sword and belt.
Above: This 19th-century engraving shows Orion, on a hunting expedition, being fatally bitten by a scorpion.
Date of the wedding. Eventually Orion lost patience and raped Merope; Oenopion blinded him in revenge. Orion then wandered helplessly until the god Hephaestus took pity on him and sent his own attendant, Kedalion, to help the blinded man. Sitting on top of Orion’s shoulders, Kedalion guided him to the abode of Helios, the sun god, and Eos, goddess of the dawn. When Eos saw Orion she was moved to tears—they became the glistening morning dew—and immediately restored his sight. On seeing his savior, Orion fell in love with her, but this angered the gods, who ordered Artemis, goddess of hunting, to slay the man with her arrows. Before he died, however, Orion repaid his debt to Hephaestus by building a subterranean temple in his honor in Sicily. He also built walls around the island’s coast to protect it from the sea.
Another legend states that Orion and Artemis fell in love and planned to marry. Their relationship was sabotaged by Artemis’s brother, Apollo, who disapproved of the union between a goddess and a human. Apollo pointed to a small bobbing object far out to sea and challenged Artemis to hit it. The goddess would never turn down a chance to show off her marksmanship, so she shot an arrow from her bow and hit the center of the distant speck. The target disappeared beneath the waves. Not long afterward the body of the victim was washed up on shore—it was
Orion, as Apollo well knew Artemis, grief-stricken, asked Zeus to place her dead lover among the stars.
Several mythological accounts of the life of Orion end with his being stung fatally by a scorpion. According to some sources, the venomous creature was set upon him by Artemis after he had raped one of her followers. In other accounts, Orion boasted that he could slay any animal, so the scorpion was his comeuppance. In a variation on this theme, the earth goddess Gaia sent the scorpion. It stung Orion, but he survived thanks to an antidote promptly administered by Asclepius, god of medicine.
World History
