The Big Dog: stars and their stories serve to inspire us

If you should look for an area that the humanities and the sciences share, you could hardly find a better area than astronomy, one of the original seven liberal arts. Scientists, beginning with ancient observers, found the starry heavens animated by their gods and heroes. We now repeat unthinkingly the Roman pantheon when discussing the planets in our solar system. The new interest in a mission to Mars, bringing about cross-planetary colonization, may be metaphor, too, for the long-lived human desire to civilize the Red Planet and tame the God of War, though myth would remind us that the missionaries should first come from Venus. Children still find the North Star by locating the Big and Little Dipper, two constellations otherwise known as the Ursa major and minor, the Big and Little Bear.

Astrologers were once close kin to astronomers, even if modern scientists are hard-pressed to recognize their worth. They kept alive a passionate interest, a fascination in the constellations, and they speak to our desire to relate our lives to the heavens above. We know our star signs on the zodiac and what they represent, and we easily speculate about their influence on our character and our fortunes. More earnestly, the great philosopher of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, also gazed upward as he contemplated our inner nature. In his conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote: “There are two things which imbue the mind with a feeling of admiration and reverence, ever renewed, and ever on the increase, the more frequently and the more perseveringly our thoughts are occupied with them: the star-clad sky there above us, and the moral law within ourselves.”1 Kant was no astrologer – far from it – but he spoke to that instinctive relation, which astrologers also survey.

In the Christmas season, when some of us think on its spiritual event, we can read about the starry influences in the gospel story told by Matthew (I cite Cassirer’s insightful translation):

          After Jesus had been born at Bethlehem in Judea, during the reign of King Herod, it happened one day that certain men skilled in the magical arts and in reading the stars, who had come from the east, made their appearance in Jerusalem. And this is what they asked: “Where is he who has been born to be king of the Jews? We have observed his star as it rose and we have come to pay him homage.”… They set out [from Jerusalem], and this is what happened to them: the star which they had seen at its rising went right ahead of them, coming to a standstill just over the place where the child was. At the sight of the star they were beside themselves with joy, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. At that they threw themselves on the ground and paid homage to him.2

Astronomically speaking, the brightest star in the heavens is Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. The US satellite radio company has taken its name, and, more poetically, the writer Nikolai Gumilyov founded a literary journal called Sirius in 1920s Paris. Because the star ascends over the horizon in July at the time of the annual Nile floods, the Egyptians worshipped it as a goddess. In the Iliad, Achilles’s flashing approach toward Hector and Troy appears to the Trojan king Priam like the rising of Sirius:

The aged Priam was the first of all whose eyes saw him
as he swept across the flat land in full shining, like that star
which comes on in autumn and whose conspicuous brightness
far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night’s darkening,
the star they give the name of Orion’s Dog, which is brightest
among the stars.3

Sirius is Orion’s Dog, and helps name the constellation Canis major, The Big Dog, which contains that star. Orion, the once and still legendary hunter, is also a constellation. Across the heavens, The Big Dog loyally follows Orion, never swerving from her purpose. She personified a storm wind in her swiftness (the Greeks called her Laelaps, “tempest”), and always caught her prey.

Loyalty, devotion, power, speed. Not every dog possesses these qualities, but almost every one has qualities we admire. Hunting and working breeds, terriers and labs, can concentrate their personalities in the presence of a task, and master feats that seem, in their drowsier moments, beyond their abilities. Scientists are discovering how they scent illness or contraband. Just as critically, they rescue those physically or emotionally shipwrecked, and provide comfort to the poor in spirit. Perhaps because we, increasingly, stand in need of this help, we live in a time when pets are in the ascendant. We will spend in the US nearly 70 billion dollars on pets in 2017, up from 40 billion ten years ago. The US is a country of 90 million dogs across 60 million households.

These earthbound, mercantile statistics quantify the numbers of dogs in our homes and neighborhoods. In many of these households, however, there is more importantly The Big Dog, the local incarnation of Laelaps or Sirius. These dogs are big beyond their size; and their lasting place, should the heavens grant it, is in the constellations we see when we, like Kant or the Magi, focus our minds on the bright loyalty, devotion, and sacrifice they bring to our lives.

1. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. H.W. Cassirer, 201; his emphasis↩

2. God’s New Covenant: A New Testament Translation, trans. Heinz W. Cassirer↩

3. Homer, The Iliad, trans. R. Lattimore, 22.25-30↩