stars to resonate during festivals. Moreover, the Greeks often located entrances to the
underworld at seaside lakes or lagoons, such as Lerna or the Acherusian lake at the
northwestern end of the Corinthian Gulf, the dead coming up to the still surface
which reflected the night sky. These giant mirrors at the entrances to the underworld
will have served further to blur the boundaries between the night sky and Hades.
Polygnotus’ painting of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, sometimes located at the
Acherusian lake, showed at least one constellation, Callisto, the Great Bear, which
never sets (Pausanias 10.31.10). For catasterism, translation to the stars, is not the
same as apotheosis. In fact the heavens represented a kind of halfway zone in
the cosmos between Hades and the realm of the Olympians, a zone perfectly suited
to the halfway status of heroes.
Some of these catasterized heroes featured in important festivals, but the point is
not that the manifestation of stars during a particular festival explains away certain
myths and rituals, but rather that it represents a spectacular circumstance on the
occasion of certain rituals and festivals, an integral and dynamic part of the sacred
landscape, its sparkling vault: the stars marking the festivals, the festivals flagging up
the stars.
There is evidence for some ‘‘immovable feasts,’’ rituals closely tied to the reappear-
ance of stars or their vanishing rather than to days of the moon. The Keans, we are
told, awaited the arrival of the dreaded Dog each year on a mountaintop under arms
like the Achaeans awaiting a wind at Aulis, so that sacrifice could be made to conjure
the assuaging ‘‘Etesian’’ winds. The Dog appears on Keos’s fourth-century coinages,
rays emanating from its head. The ritual was said to have been inaugurated by
Aristaeus, father of dog-plagued Actaeon, thus confirming other hints that he too
was identified with Orion: ‘‘The man who saw his son killed by dogs put a stop to that
star which of the stars in heaven has the same title’’ (Diodorus 4.82.3). In the agora
of Phlius in the Peloponnese, meanwhile, Pausanias noted a bronze she-goat partly
covered in gold: ‘‘the star they call the Goat (Aix) on its rising [mid-May onwards],
ravages the vines without pause. In order that nothing disagreeable comes of it, the
Phliasians honor the bronze goat in the agora, especially by adorning the image with
gold’’ (2.13.6).
Other rituals associated with asterisms are undated, but we can make an informed
guess at what the relevant stars were up to during the festival. In Euripides’
Erechtheus(fr. 370TrGF), Athena expounds upon the catasterism of Erechtheus’
sacrificed virgin daughters as the Hyades (the muzzle of Taurus): ‘‘I lodged their
spirit in the ether; and I will establish a famous name for mortals to call them by
throughout Greece: ‘Goddesses Hyacinthides’...I tell mytownspeople to honor
them with sacrifices each year, never in the course of time forgetting, with slit-
throated ox-killings [sphagaisi bouktonois], and decorative dances, sacred and
maidenly... and to offer to them first the sacrifice before battle ... And these girls
must have an uninfringeable sanctuary and you must keep any enemy from sacri-
ficing furtively there, a victory for them, but for this land, affliction....’’ In the
Katasterismoitheir father, Erechtheus/Erichthonius was identified with Auriga, the
Chariot-Driver, whose death is described in terms of being ‘‘hidden’’ in a cleft in
the earth opened by Poseidon’s trident (Euripides,Ion281–2;Erechtheusfr. 370.60).
Indeed from the end of August, Capella (Aix), the very bright star forming Auriga’s
shoulder, reached its apex directly above the Erechtheum and may have been visible
Ogden / Companion to Greek Religion 1405120541_4_013 Final Proof page 207 17.11.2006 10:11amTime and Greek Religion 207