Star Tales – Aquarius

Star maps show Aquarius as a young man pouring water from a jar, although Ovid, in his Fasti, says it is a mixture of water and nectar, the drink of the gods. The stream ends in the mouth of the Southern Fish, Piscis Austrinus. But who is Aquarius? The most popular identification is that he is Ganymede or Ganymedes, said to have been the most beautiful boy alive. He was the son of King Tros, who gave Troy its name. One day, while Ganymede was watching over his father’s sheep, Zeus became infatuated with the shepherd boy and swooped down on the Trojan plain in the form of an eagle, carrying Ganymede up to Olympus (or, according to an alternative version, sent an eagle to do it for him). The eagle is commemorated in the neighbouring constellation of Aquila.

In another version of the myth, Ganymede was first carried off by Eos, goddess of the dawn, who had a passion for young men, and Zeus then stole Ganymede from her. Ganymede became wine-waiter to the gods, dispensing nectar from his bowl, to the annoyance of Zeus’s wife Hera. Robert Graves tells us that this myth became highly popular in ancient Greece and Rome where it was regarded as signifying divine endorsement for homosexuality. The Latin translation of the name Ganymede gave rise to the word catamite.

Aquarius and his water jar, from the Atlas Coelestis of John Flamsteed.

If this myth seems insubstantial to us, it is perhaps a result of the Greeks imposing their own story on a constellation adopted from elsewhere. The constellation of the water pourer originally seems to have represented the Egyptian god of the Nile – but, as Robert Graves notes, the Greeks were not much interested in the Nile.

Germanicus Caesar identifies the constellation with Deucalion, son of Prometheus, one of the few men to escape the great flood. ‘Deucalion pours forth water, that hostile element he once fled, and in so doing draws attention to his small pitcher’, wrote Germanicus. Hyginus offers the additional identification of the constellation with Cecrops, an early king of Athens, seen making sacrifices to the gods using water, for he ruled in the days before wine was made.

Several stars in Aquarius have names beginning with ‘Sad’. In Arabic, sa’d means ‘luck’. Alpha Aquarii is called Sadalmelik, from sa’d al-malik, usually translated as ‘the lucky stars of the king’. Beta Aquarii is called Sadalsuud, from sa’d al-su’ud, possibly meaning ‘luckiest of the lucky’. Gamma Aquarii is Sadachbia, from sa’d al-akhbiya, possibly meaning ‘lucky stars of the tents’. The exact significance of these names has been lost even by the Arabs, according to the German expert on star names, Paul Kunitzsch.