Dog Days and Death Stars, Part 1

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the dog days of summer, their connection to a luminous star in the night’s sky and various ideas linking the summer’s hottest days to human and animal behavior.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And Today and Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I wanted
to begin a series investigating the origins and meaning of
a phrase, a phrase that I have heard all my life,
mostly without understanding, and that phrase is the dog days
of summer. Definitely an expression that's been on my mind

(00:38):
the past few weeks. We've had some brutally hot days
here in my neighborhood, I assume in yours to Rob, yeah,
and in a lot of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
It's just been hot times all around. And it's like
the other day I was, I was grilling for a
get together, and so it's like the sun is just vicious,

(00:58):
and then you've got heat coming up from below too
on the grill, and it's just like wolf. Now. I
don't know when I first heard this phrase, the dog
days of summer, but I believe I can recall some
of the assumptions I had about this phrase when I
was young. So I thought it applied to a sort

(01:20):
of a sub section of summer, like the days later
in the summer season. I thought of it as like
late August. I don't know why the dog days had
the connotation of heat, but not necessarily like happy, fun
time playing outdoors heat, more like kind of sickening, oppressive heat,

(01:40):
threatening heat.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
You better be at a swimming pool or the beach heat. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, And I also I think took the name dog
days of summer quite literally in interpreting where it came from.
I thought the dog days must have something to do
with the health or behavior of dogs, Like they're called
that because this is the time of year when dogs
are so overheated, so exhausted, they can't even run around

(02:09):
and be frisky. They're just gonna lay down in the
grass and pant all day.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, you know, I did look up the temperature preferred
temperature ranges for most dogs because of that possible connection.
And yeah, I mean it is one of the interesting
things about that dogs, like cats, generally like it warmer
than we like it, but not that warm. There is
a cutoff point where they're like, that's that's too hot.
That's a little too hot for me.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Oh that's interesting, I guess apart from any ancestral you know,
climate preference. That probably also has to do with just
like dogs having smaller body mass than humans on average,
like when you're smaller, you do better in warmer conditions.
But you know, also I was thinking another thing, like
I think of the dog days as days that are

(02:55):
so hot that people become sick. And so I think
that was the other link in my brain. When I
was younger, I was thinking like, oh, okay, you're sick
as a dog. And in part, I think I associated
this with a late summer tradition if you were on
sports teams as like a kid in the nineties or

(03:15):
the two thousands of puke week in soccer training. Do
you ever have puke week?

Speaker 2 (03:20):
I don't think it was called as such, but I
remember similar situations, the similar feelings when it came to
like summertime soccer practice.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
And I don't know if coaches are supposed to, you know,
put that kind of emphasis on it these days, but
but yeah, there is this idea that like you're gonna
you're gonna physically exhaust yourself in this like preseason fitness
conditioning thing, and there's going to be a lot of vomiting.
People get sick as dogs out there, practicing in the
hot weather.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, I had to really think back to and yeah,
I don't remember when I started hearing the phrase the
dog days of summer and uh and I only like
loosely have different connections to make there with it. Like,
on one hand, it does always remind me of the
old saying about like the noonday heat on a hot day,

(04:10):
about how only mad dogs and Englishmen are going to
go out in it. Everyone else who knows better is
going to stay out of the heat, stay out of
the sun, and you know, not exert themselves. And I
haven't looked deeply into that. There may be more of
a connection there that I'm giving credit. The other is
is a much looser connection, But I think it always

(04:30):
makes me think of Don Henley creeping on ex lovers,
specifically the Boys of Summer, and to be hyper specific,
the excellent music video that was directed by Jean Baptiste Mordino,
who went on to direct a number of major music
videos after that, including several for Madonna. But great song,

(04:52):
great music video, kind of creepy lyrics, but as just
a general vibe without getting into the lyrical content, that
song always makes me think of sort of the same
timeframe we're talking about, there's some sort of not only
is there like the oppressive heat typically of this kind
of like late summer dog days of summer era, but
there's this there's this kind of feeling of sadness to

(05:15):
it as well, you know, maybe getting into that summertime
sadness that that other musicians sing off.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah you got to go back to school, leave your
summer friends behind, or the summer fling is over, that
kind of yeah, where.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, summer is coming to a close, and maybe you're
excited about fall. But also it's like things are moving
a bit fast. It's you know, the passage of time
brings with it a certain weight.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
I went and watched this music video because you referenced
it in the notes, and I guess I'm not intending
to insult it. It definitely has an eighties MTV charm,
but I was thinking, nobody's sweaty in this video. Did
you notice it's like very cool, dry looking summer. I
mean it's shot in black and white, as I think
you said, so, the cinematography of it is very very

(06:00):
cool in a way. It looks like film noir. It's
kind of crisp and a little well, it's like Film
Noir meets Leave It to Beaver, you know's they're both qualities.
There's that like little kid playing the drums in it,
but nobody looks like sweaty and wet and gross and greasy.
It just looks like everybody's freshly powdered out of the
makeup room.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, anytime I go back and watch it, I do
sometimes think this is not as summary as I remember
it being. But the song itself, you know, especially the
little synth part to it, like really sticks in my
mind as the as tied to the dog Days of Summer.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Oh totally, no, I see what you mean. Yeah, it
has that late summer feeling, and there is something something
kind of dark and negative associated with the heat that
seems to be coming along in the phrase. So it
turns out that my childhood intuitions about the meaning of
the meaning and origin of the Dog Days of Summer

(06:57):
were partially right and partially wrong. So the Dog days
of Summer probably do not originally get their name from
anything having to do with the behavior of dogs, like
panting in hot weather or I don't know, whatever else
dogs do when it gets really hot, lying down flat
on the floor that.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Sort of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
Rather, they are named for their association with a star. Actually,
they get their name from ancient astrology. The star is
called Serious or the dog star, and it's the brightest
star in the constellation Canis Major, and in fact the
brightest star in the Earth's night sky. However, despite the

(07:39):
fact that the expression dog days is not based on
the behavior of dogs in August, there is actually a
whole subsequent folklore and belief system about how the dog
star is supposed to have strange effects on canines, like
it interacts with dog health and friskiness and rabidity. It

(08:00):
seems the dog days of summer are historically associated with
extreme heat going way back. They are not consistently attached
to any particular days or any particular part of summer,
but within each different time and place in history, they
kind of get their own calendar range. So, you know,

(08:23):
the ancient Greeks in one era thought of the dog
days as a certain range of weeks in the summertime
stretching into autumn maybe, and you know, the ancient Egyptians
might have thought of them as a slightly different range,
and people think of them as maybe a different range
yet still today in different parts of the world. So
there's not like a start and end date of the

(08:43):
dog days on the calendar for all of history. But
if you're going to be strictly astronomical in your definition
of when they begin, we can identify what that date
is today, at least for different latitudes. Yeah, and so
it turns out that this common saying that makes people
think of dogs panting and the heat actually traces back

(09:05):
to obscure and in some cases bizarre, fascinating astrological beliefs
of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, with all these
connections to ancient literature and mythology and astronomy and the
history of medicine. So that's what we're going to be
talking about for the next couple of episodes. As one
of the first things we get into here, I thought

(09:26):
it might be good to look at an invocation of
the dog star and its attendance season in ancient literature.
One of the early references to the dog star and
the implied seasonal effects of the dog Star is actually
in the Iliad of Homer, where the dog Star is

(09:46):
said to carry a host of malignant characteristics. So I'm
about to read a passage from the Iliad, and I'll
need to establish some context so you can understand the meaning.
The passage I'm going to read is from booked twenty two,
and this happens in the story after Patroclus, the companion
of the Greek warrior Achilles, has been killed in battle

(10:09):
by the Trojan prince Hector. This drives Achilles into a
rage and he storms back into battle. He had been
refusing to fight for a long time after a conflict
that he had with the Greek king Agamemnon, but now
after his friend has been killed, his passions have brought
him back to the war. So at this point in
the poem, the deadly Achilles is charging the walls of Troy,

(10:33):
and he's coming for revenge against the Trojan Prince Hector.
And this passage is going to mention the king of Troy,
King Priam of Troy, who is Hector's father. This is
significant because Priam looks out and sees Achilles coming, sees
him coming across the plaine, and he knows in his
heart that the approach of Achilles could spell doom for

(10:55):
his son. He knows that his son will likely be
killed by Achilles. So he's about to urge he not
to face Achilles alone. So first I'm going to take
a look at the Richmond Latimore translation. This begins talking
about Achilles. Oh, and I should say in this translation
he calls Achilles Achilleus. Just to avoid confusion here, so

(11:17):
Latimer translates Achilleus. He spoke and stalked away against the city,
with high thoughts in mind, and in tearing speed, like
a racehorse with his chariot, who runs lightly as he
pulls the chariot over the flat land. Such was the
action of Achilleus, in feet and quick knees. The aged

(11:37):
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 bright as among the stars, and

(12:01):
yet is wrought as a sign of evil and brings
on the great fever for unfortunate mortals. Such was the
flare of the bronze that girt his chest in his running.
And then after this Priam calls out to his son
Hector begs him not to not to go face Achilles alone.
Just to get another flavor of how this can be translated,

(12:22):
I want to read those lines about the star from
another translation. This is the more recent Emily Wilson translation.
So she describes what Priam saw and says, quote, he
saw the gleam, just like the star that rises in
late summer, whose beams shine bright amid the constellations at
dead of night. The people call it dog Star, Ryan's dog,

(12:46):
which flashes dazzling light, an evil omen bringing many fevers
to poor, unhappy Mortals. So the bronze shone on Achilles'
breastplate as he sprinted. So I love these passages. They're
really evocative. And this is actually a recurring theme in
the Iliad of light coming off of Achilles. So we

(13:10):
actually talked about a different section of the poem that
has Achilles gleaming in a different sense in our I
think it was a series we did a couple of
years ago on the tradition of Halos, because there's a
passage in book eighteen of the Iliad, this weird, fascinating
moment where Achilles appears before the Trojans ready again for battle,

(13:31):
and a crown of light is said to emanate from
his head. It's described sort of like you might think
of a halo, but maybe more majestic. It's like a
cloud of golden fire projecting up into the heavens, like
a beacon.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Kind of crazy that we have to say more majestic
than a halo, because the halo is just kind of
overrepresented in Western art, and it is sometimes presented in
a very simplified manner, but in its basic idea is
always majestic, always ce last youal.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
Well, I guess I'm thinking of the halo as at
least as we see it in like Renaissance art. It's
something that looks like only people nearby would see it.
The way it's described in the Iliad, it looks like
you can see this light coming off of achilles head
for miles. Yeah, so this light in book eighteen, this
different passage, you know, this light could be in one
sense interpreted as a show of achilles intrinsic fury, like

(14:28):
he's burning with hate and with passion after the death
of his friend so powerfully that this light is coming out,
but more explicitly in the poem, it is said to
be a sign of the blessing of the goddess Athena,
who favors Achilles and helps him kill his enemies. In fact,
even after this passage we read from book twenty two,

(14:49):
Athena is going to help Achilles kill Hector, because you're
going to trick Hector while they're chasing around into thinking
that help is coming for him, and then Achilles will
use that to his advantage and kill him. Coming back
to this passage from book twenty two, Achilles has this
different kind of radiance, so he's running across the plane
to kill Hector. His bronze armor gleams in the sun,

(15:12):
and the poet says that the glint from his breastplate
is like the light from the star of Orion's Dog,
which in a sense contains kind of contradictions. On one hand,
it is the brightest star in the night sky, which
seems good, you know, much like Achilles is the Achaean's
greatest warrior. He's like, you know, the brightest star in

(15:34):
the sky of the Greek forces. But also the dog
star is an evil omen which brings fever and calamity,
much like Achilles is bringing death. And destruction to Hector,
and in fact, at this point in the story, to
everyone in his path. So, in Homer's telling, the brilliance
of the dog Star comes with a curse. You've got

(15:57):
poor unfortunate mortals everywhere who must suffer under the wickedness
of O'Brien's dog and burn with fevers in their bodies
at the same time knowing that it's the most brilliant
and in a way, the most beautiful star in the heavens.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
As a side note here, just for later everyone, is
you're listening to this, make a note of what color
you imagine the dog star in this telling and this
gleam coming off of Achilles. It may prove useful later
on in our discussion.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Very good point.

Speaker 4 (16:29):
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
So to explore the role of the dog Star in
the Iliad a little bit more, I wanted to turn
now to a book that Rob and I have both
been reading for this episode. So this is a book
called Serious Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky by Jay Holberg,
published by Springer, New York tow and seven. The author,

(17:02):
j Holberg is an astrophysicist and an astronomy historian who
was affiliated with the University of Arizona. I think he's
retired now, Rob. I know you've looked up some stuff
about his career.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, yeah, I was reading that. Yeah, he worked at
the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which of
course came up earlier this year on the show in
our episode about Kartchner Caverns, because one of the co
discoverers of the caverns, Randy Tufts, went on to attend
and work there. And I dug a little deeper, and

(17:33):
I did confirm that they did it, at least to
some extent, work together, as Tufts actually thanked Holberg in
his nineteen ninety eight thesis paper, And for all I know,
they might have worked closer later on, but they at
least knew of each other.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
That is a very sweet and unexpected connection. But I'm
going to say also that I've been liking this book
by Holberg, like he has a good way of writing
about the history and the cultural history of this the
astronomy and the astrology interpretations.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yeah. Yeah, a rare gift to be able to really
handle both so so well and at the same time
produce such a readable text. Yeah, as we get into
discussing serious in depth, We're just going to continually refer
out to this book. It ultimately becomes a challenge not
to put like everything that Holberg is telling you into
the notes because we can't discuss all of it, but

(18:23):
like he really digs into the Greek and Roman aspects,
the Egyptian aspects, and so much more.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Well, yeah, I have to credit Holberg because I initially
only dug up this one passage in the Iliad about
the dog star, but it was in reading him that
I realized there are actually other references to it in
the Iliad, like it comes back again, and these other
references really reinforce what it means to Homer and to
Homer's original audience. So earlier in the Iliad, in book five,

(18:53):
the Greek hero Diomedes, another one of the Achaeans. He's
the master of the war. Cry is often say he's
preparing for battle, and Holberg uses the Robert Fitzgerald translation,
So I'm just going to stick with that for this reading.
And the section goes like this quote, Now, Diomede's hour
for great action came Athena, made him bold and gave

(19:17):
him ease to tower amid argives to win glory, and
on his shield and helm she kindled fire most like
Midsommer's purest flaming Star in heaven, rising bathed by the
ocean stream, so fiery she made his head and shoulders
as she impelled him to the center where the greatest
number fought. So here I'd say the emphasis really does

(19:41):
seem to be on the brilliance of the dog star
of the Summer's purest flaming or Midsommer's purest flaming Star,
as Fitzgerald translates. So Athena is preparing her hero for
combat by making his shield and helmet gleam like the
brightest star which rises in the summer. Now, I would
note that we also get something similar here to that

(20:04):
later moment when Achilles is crowned with a glowing halo.
This is a little more understated, but here Athena makes
the head and shoulders of Diomedes fiery. So it's like
the goddess's blessing gives him a glow that he carries
with him into battle, and I guess makes him more
terrifying to his enemies as well, maybe in one sense,

(20:26):
like directly, like oh, that's unusual to see. That's scary,
but also it communicates the Goddess's favor, which you don't
want to see in your enemies. And I think also
there seems to be an idea that the sign of
excellence and the sign of the God's favor can be
seen visually in the magnitude of light reflected off of

(20:50):
a person or even being emitted from them. That like
something about the greatness of a person, their level of
blessedness by the gods is reflected in how bright they are.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, I mean this kind of good digs into something
you see and pretty much universally, as we we try
and figure out what our roles are in the course
of life and in human events, we look up to
the heavens and we see these little pinpoints of light
and we think about their distances between each other, their
differences in luminosity, and we kind of we cannot help

(21:24):
but draw comparisons between the two, even if we're not
getting into like some real hardcore astrology and saying, well,
this determines this, and this determines that just on a
basic metaphorical level, we can't help but compare the two.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Yeah, yeah, totally just noticing the multitudes of them and
the differences in brightness. I think naturally invites comparisons to humanity.
Yeah yeah, because which guitar am I yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Yeah, which because as we'll get into in more detail,
I mean, if if you're not aware, the stars do
change determined depending on like you know, where you are
in the world, and and and where we are in
in the orbit of things. You know, stars are going
to seem to enter and exit this grand show above us.
They're gonna grow dimmer, they're gonna grow brighter, and so forth.

(22:10):
There'll be other events that take place. So in many
ways it does become this interesting little model for human interactions.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
One more passage that Holberg highlights from the Iliad is
from book eleven. This is also the Fitzgerald translation he uses,
and it reads like this, talking about now the Trojan
Prince Hector, it says Hector moved forward with his round
faced shield as from night clouds, a baleful summer star
will blaze into the clear then fade in cloud. So

(22:43):
Hector shown in front or became hidden when he harangued
the rear ranks, his whole form in a bronze of
flash like lightning. Of Father Zeus. Now in this passage,
you could still associate the brilliance with like virtue in battle,
or with the fame favor of a god. But Holberg notes,
and I think I agree that this passage has an

(23:05):
overall darker tone and really emphasizes the Summer Star as
something that emerges frighteningly from a place of hiddenness and
brings death and doom with it. And just a note
here briefly, because we're going to be referring to the
star a lot as serious, that is its common name today.

(23:26):
The Iliad never refers to the star by the Greek
name serious, other later Greek sources do, but Homer only
names it by its brightness, or by its association with Midsummer,
or by its association with Orion's dog. So that's how
we know what star he's talking about here. He doesn't
say serious. He says the star of Rion's dog, which
is serious, or the brightest star in the sky, which

(23:49):
is serious, or the star of Midsummer, which is serious.
So these passages from the Iliad highlight kind of a
tension of opposite connotations within the Dog star. On one hand,
you've got brilliance warmth and glory, and on the other hand,
you've got death and doom. And I thought it was

(24:09):
kind of interesting that this exact tension continues in a
lot of references to the Star and its time of year,
the dog days of summer, the time of the Star
in much more recent literature. And just one example. You know, Rob,
you brought up the Boys of Summer by Don Henley earlier,
but I started thinking about the other boys of Summer,

(24:31):
the poem I See the Boys of Summer by Dylan Thomas.
Do you know this one?

Speaker 2 (24:36):
You know, I actually don't know this poem, but I
am assuming now this had to be the reference point
for the Don Henley song.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
I have no idea. I don't know Boys of Summer.
It seems like he could. You could arrive at that
phrase independently. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe you can
judge at the end whether this is what Don Henley
had in mind or not. So if you've read it before,
you might remember the opening line that says, I see
the boy of Summer in their ruin lay the gold

(25:02):
Tithings Barren. So the boys of Summer in this poem
are described as very lively, carefree, active. They're kind of
almost literally glowing with vitality, like Achilles and diamites. But
as with a lot of Dylan Thomas poems, the poet
describes seeing an inevitable force of destruction and decay within

(25:27):
the lively activities of the boys of Summer. There's like
a death principle that must come round within even the
most vital activities of life. So the second stands of
this poem reads, this will kind of give you a flavor.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, sour,
the boiling honey, the jacks of frost they finger in

(25:50):
the hives. There in the sun, the frigid threads of
doubt and dark they feed their nerves. The signal moon
is zero in their voids.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
MM.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
So that gives you some idea. The poem is a
lot about the the interdependency of life and death, of
summer and winter, of these opposites, that things that are
very much alive carry death within them, and vice versa.
But there is eventually in this poem a reference to
the days of the summer star. The dog days are
referenced by name in lines that say quote, they're from

(26:26):
their hearts. The dog dayed pulse of love and light
bursts in their throats. Oh see the pulse of summer
in the ice.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Oh wow. Well, you know, all this makes me think
that there has to be a clear connection between this
poem and the Boys of Summer, And it makes me
rethink the way I've loosely interpreted Boys of Summer all
these years, because I again, when I actually take the
time to listen to the lyrics, I'm assuming that it
is Don Henley or Don Henley's character in the song

(26:56):
obviously kind of creeping on an ex lever girlfriend and
basically saying, when you're done running around with you know
these the these these hot guys, when that is cooled over,
I'm gonna still be here and I'm gonna get my
second chance.

Speaker 4 (27:11):
Your dry guy will be right here.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah yeah, yeah. But but maybe it's it's something I
don't know, maybe warmer than that, Like it's I mean,
maybe he is directly, you know, saying like, look, you're
in a different place in your life right now, and
you're happy, great, but eventually, you know you're gonna enter
a new phase and that's where I'm going to still
be here for you. Or maybe he is not. The

(27:35):
Don Henley character in this song is not immortal. Maybe
it is. Maybe he is God or something, and he
is saying, look, look right now, you're having you know,
the wild times of your life. You're having this this
hot young period. You're what is it, your hot girl
summer if you will. But eventually you're gonna get into

(27:55):
a different era and you're gonna need me, and I'm
gonna be here for you, and I'm gonna, you know,
welcome you in with open arms.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
It's time to think about death. Yeah, let's talk about
death during summer break.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, that's where the summertime sadness comes in. I can
see channel Lanondel.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
Ray there you go. I'm you know, I think you
might not be far off. This could really be in there.
I mean, certainly the sound of the song is dark,
you know, it doesn't it brings in a melancholy There
is some death consciousness in it.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
I think. Well, at the same time, I don't think
you would necessarily call it yacht rock, but there is
some crossover with some of those vibes, I think, but
in a more of a synth pop direction.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah, yeah, there's a little bit also. If I'm all right,
don't nobody worry about me?

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
So, Holberg explains that these lines in the Iliad, talking
about these different connotations of the dog Star, they bring
up themes that will appear over and over for the
next thousand years in Greek and Roman literature, and the themes
associated with the dog star are fire, heat and brightness

(29:03):
seasonal heat, so not just like fiery heat, but also
the hottest part of the summer doom I mean. Holberg
explicitly says that in the Iliad, it is portrayed as
a death star. It is explicitly said to be a
star that brings sickness and fever with it, it brings
the plague. But also within the story, by association, it

(29:27):
is associated with these figures who are going into battle
to kill. It is something that is bringing death and destruction.
And then also there is some kind of link to
dogs in the more literal sense, even though it's not
named after what dogs do in hot weather, and so
for all these reasons, the dog days in English this
phrase in English, which has existed at least since the

(29:49):
fifteen hundreds in English, has come to refer to the
hottest days of summer in the northern hemisphere. Traditionally, the
beginning of the Dog Days were marked by what's known
as the hiliacal rising of the star Sirius, the dog star,
which means that this is when Sirius would rise over

(30:12):
the eastern horizon just before dawn. For the ancient Greeks,
the Dog Days were generally said to begin sometime in
July and they would extend through August and into part
of September. But this, of course, as I said earlier,
it varies by time and place in history where exactly
people place the Dog Days, and also for real physical

(30:36):
astronomical reasons, the timing of the rising of the hallikal
rising of Sirius actually does change depending on where you
are on the Earth and in history. So because the
star serious is the brightest star in the night sky,
and because around this time of year, when it started

(30:56):
rising just before the sun, before dawn, you could think
of it as like, wow, the brightest star is like
aligned with the Sun almost you know, they're coming up together.
And so because of this, many ancient peoples in ancient Greece, Egypt,
and Rome thought that the star was actually scorching the

(31:18):
earth along with the Sun, that this was the hottest
part of the summer. Because Sirius was essentially adding its
heat to the Sun's heat. It's like turning a second
burner on under the same pan. You know, you're like
doubling the heat output, or not necessarily doubling, but literally
just increasing that the heat being thrust into the earth system.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Like you when it's you know, five pm, mid August
and you realize that the recipe you're cooking to night
calls for you to use the broilers, just adding it
doesn't really rival the Sun's heat, but it is contributing
to the heat of your kitchen and living room.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
Well except yeah, in your house the broiler actually, you know,
turning on the oven actually does warm your house up.
As we will discuss, the heat put out by serious
would be a lot of heat if you were close
to it. It is not close enough to us to
make any difference whatsoever to the around of heat on Earth.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
So it's not actually doing that. And I do want
to go ahead and say, you know, obviously, you know
we're discussing a lot of supernatural content here at the
top of this episode. Obviously this is not an actual
evil star. It's light does not actually do anything evil.
I mean, ultimately we're talking like, you know what three

(32:34):
of as many as like three months out of the year,
and a lot of good things happen in those months too,
So I don't know, Just in case anyone has any
subliminal superstition that's kind of welling up, you know how
you do, We're like, maybe there's something to this. Bad
stuff does happen in August sometimes, but yes, also good stuff.
So just to go ahead and throw that out.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yes, let this be the disclaimer for this whole series.
We are not advocating the supernatural claims of astrology or
saying that a star has it out for you. The
star is not going to get you.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
But those ideas can be sticky, as they have always
been sticky in human culture, you know, certainly before we
had our modern understanding of the movement of the spheres,
but even today so.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
The ancient Romans called the days following the rising of
the Dog star the DS caniculais or the days of
the Dog Star. They actually placed Siirious within the constellation
Canus major, or the Greater Dog. There are two dog constellations,
Canus major and Canus minor, the Greater Dog and the

(33:36):
lesser dog, which are both associated with the mythic huntsman Orion,
who was kind of giant figure. And as I mentioned earlier,
the term dog days in referring to the hottest period
of summer does seem to show up in English at
least as far back as the fifteen hundred, So this
phrase has been kicking around in English for a while,

(33:57):
based on these traditions that are much much older, going
back in to the ancient world, to the Greeks, to
the Romans, and to the Egyptians, who pegged the rising
of Sirius to the onset of the season for the
annual flooding of the Nile.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yes, yes, the inundation.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Yeah, okay, So there's a foundation for the history of
how the rising of serious, the halliical rising of Sirius
has been processed culturally and what it has meant to

(34:33):
people in these sources of literature and things like that.
Will come back and talk more about the cultural meaning
of Sirius and the dog days of Summer later on,
but first I think we should just focus for a
bit on the star itself. What is going on with
this dog star?

Speaker 4 (34:49):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah? Yeah, it is essential to strip away all the
supernatural stuff for a minute and just talk about what
it is. It is the brightest star in the night sky,
and when conditions are right, it is so bright that
it can be seen during the day as well. As such,
the star, given many different names by different stargazs and

(35:12):
cultures throughout human history, has played a role in various
different surviving astronomies and astrologies. You know, it's just if
you're if you're if you're just day one and you're
going to create a brand new astrology, you know you're
gonna you're gonna you're gonna notice the things that really
stand out. And that's what Sirius does. If if it
is visible in the sky for you, it stands out.

(35:35):
So what is it? Well, the light of Sirius is
that of a luminous am star or metallic line star,
uh known as serious A. It's roughly twice as large
as our own star, the Sun, and twenty five times brighter.
Now I've said Serious A because it also has a companion,

(35:56):
and this is Serious B. Serious B is a massive
white dwarf roughly the size of Earth, much smaller than
Serious A, much fainter. It was not discovered by astronomers
till eighteen sixty two CE. Meanwhile, again, knowledge of Serious A,
which is visible to the naked eye, goes all the

(36:18):
way back through human stargays and cultures, you know, back
into prehistory. These two stars, Serious A and Serious B,
we know now that they orbit each other in a
binary system, and at present these are the only two
confirmed astral bodies in the system. As I'll touch on later,
there is a hypothesis that there could be a Serious C,

(36:41):
but that is a pure hypothesis at this point and
nothing has been proven. And likewise, it has no known planet.
So as far as we know, it's just Serious A
and Serious B out there, you know, orbiting each other.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
Am I correct in assuming that Serious B is basically
not observable before the advent of telescopes, because it would
be it would be hidden by the glare of Serious A.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
Right, It's just way too faint. It is just a
much fainter light. Yeah, it would not have been viewable
to any humans before the advent of telescopes.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
And am I also correct that Serious A is is
the brightest star in our night sky for two different reasons,
both because it has very high inherent luminosity and because
it's very close, so it has two different things both
contributing to it being pretty bright from our point of view.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
That's right, that's right, And I believe I have the
stat on how far away it is that I'll come
back to in just a second. Okay, but first I
want to touch on something that I thought was really
really interesting. Again, we've already touched on the reality that
the stars everything is in motion. You know, you've seen
charts of our Solar system, You've probably seen charts of

(37:56):
our Milky Way galaxy, and you know that everything's moving around,
everything's orbiting around other things. You know, everything is in
motion and things change, and so it's just fascinating to
point out that while Sirius is currently the most luminous
star in the night sky, it won't always be and
it wasn't always the brightest. So I found a really

(38:20):
nice explainer article that's easily accessed to everyone out there
by one Steve Hurley over at explaining science dot org.
I thought he did a nice job of walking through
a lot of this, so I'm sourcing some of his
material here. In addition to the book that we referenced, earlier.
But yeah, Sirius has shown the brightest through virtually all

(38:42):
of recorded human history, so you know everything. We're talking
about the ancient ancient Romans, ancient Greeks, the ancient Chinese,
and certainly the ancient Egyptians. It was the brightest for them.
But if you were to travel back in time some
ninety thousand years, it would not be the case. So
we're talking about a time before the earliest surviving examples

(39:07):
of abstract art or symbolism, an age of nomadic hunter gatherers,
a time when Homo sapiens still shared the world with
the Neanderthals that long ago. Now, at this point, another star,
Cannapis was the brightest. Cannabis is still there, of course.
It is the second brightest star in the night sky.

(39:28):
It is a bright giant, an enormous star that has
already passed through its main sequence in red giant branch stages.
It would have been the brightest star in Earth's sky
for much of the last four million years, but today
it shines only half as bright as serious.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
Oh interesting, So what changed in the past few tens
of thousands of years. Is it something that changed about
the luminosity of Cannapis, or is it something that changed
about like our relative position to these two stars.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Or what it's the position. Yeah, so you know, the
stars themselves have not really changed during this very cosmologically
brief period of time. Again, this is one of those
where there's some great visual depictions to this, but the
time we're talking about the time of human awareness of
the stars is just so ridiculously minuscule. It's it's almost

(40:23):
a joke, you know. So in this very brief period
of time, Yeah, the stars themselves have not material These
stars anyway have not materially changed, but their position in
relation to our planet has serious is approaching our Solar
system at a speed of something like five point five
kilometers per second. It's currently eight point six light years away,

(40:47):
the fifth closest star to our solar system, and it
will reach its absolute closest point seven point eight light
years away sixty thousand years from now, and at this
point it will shine twenty percent brighter in the sky
than it does now. So if you've planned to be

(41:08):
around sixty thousand years from now, you know, look out
for it. It's going to be even brighter. And if
these supernatural ideas have anything do them. It's going to
be a really rough time. There's going to be a
lot of hot blooded action concerning the boys and the
warriors of Summer.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Well, funny thing to note. As it gets closer and
thus brighter over the next sixty thousand years, it will
also lose its natural calindrical association with summer. So I
was reading and I think I saw this, Oh, I saw.
I read this in an article on history dot com
by Christopher Klein about the Dog Days of Summer, where

(41:46):
Klein mentions an estimate that in about ten thousand years,
the Hallikal Rising of Sirius is going to be so
far pushed back in the calendar that it's no longer
going to be associated with summer. It will be in
the northern hend hemisphere. It will be in the winter,
So we will have the dog days of winter by then.
Oh wow, but that's just ten thousand years. I don't

(42:07):
know how many cycles we're going to go through by
the time we get to sixty thousand. Yeah, maybe it'll
be back in summer at that point.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yeah. We're dealing with lengths of time that dwarf human
life span, obviously, and even these are minuscule again, just
faintly menuscule periods of time in the grand scheme of
the movements of the milky White galaxy.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, but it is it is funny to think about
how we use these, you know, astral associations with the
calendar as these fixed things that recur a year after
year and give meaning and structure to human life. And
on the timescale of human life, that can be useful.
But you know, over the age even just of human
civilizations and human history, like our relative position to these

(42:51):
stars does change, and so like the star risings happen
at different times of year than they did the thousands
of years ago.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yeah, it's kind of like when I was a certain age,
I knew it was nine PM because that's when Star
Trek the next generation came on. At the time. That
was a perfect way to measure time. It did not
hold up outside of my junior high years anyway. But yeah,
so is the heavens move and as serious begins to
move away from us, it's going to become fainter, and

(43:22):
over the course of a million years or so, and
his serious dims in our sky, the star Vega will
glow brighter, becoming the brightest by the year I believe
two hundred thousand CE and dominate for three hundred thousand
years before Cannabis comes around again, close enough to outshine
the other stars in our sky once more. Other stars

(43:43):
too are going to dim and glow brighter over time
as well, but you know, these are going to be
the main superstars in our in our cosmic lifespan.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
What's going on with Vega and not where the signal
came from in contact?

Speaker 2 (43:59):
I think, so oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the fascinating thing.
And I tried not to get too dragged into it,
and certainly for this episode. But all of these closest
stars and brightest stars, they don't not at this point,
and they don't only only have their scientific knowledge behind
them and whatever kind of astrological weight they have, but

(44:20):
they also have various sci fi things attached to them
as well, like.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
What aliens come from there?

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Yeah? What aliens come from there? How do they fit
into the Dune universe? You know, some of them are
tied in with certain planets in the Dune universe and
so forth. So I tried not to go down any
of those rabbit holes too much, but hey, maybe we'll
do those rabbit holes later, at least concerning Serious. So again,
all this is due to the orbits of these various
stars and their systems around the center of the Milky

(44:48):
Way galaxy altering the distance between them over the course
of cosmic time, meaning that with growing and shrieking distances,
stars appear to dim and then swell in luminosity as
the great wheel of the galaxy turn. And again, just
interesting to think about the idea that again, pretty much
all of human civilization as we know it and reflect
on it thus far has existed and could wind up

(45:11):
existing entirely if it were to come to a sudden
end when within the cosmologically brief reign of Serious, and
it wouldn't even have to end soon. The end could
come a good ways off, you know, and it would
still you could, it could still have all virtually taken
place within the reign of Serious.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Okay, So to bring in some of the connotations of
say Homer, the death Star could reign over us all
the way to the end.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
But then it also saw all the good stuff too,
So yeah, that's true. It saw all the even numbered
star treks and all the odd numbered star treks. If
you align with that particular reasoning, which is also kind
of its own form of a struggle.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Well, that's right, Yeah, Homer has both connotations the radiance,
it's the most brilliant in the sky. It's also the
doom and the fevers. We get both.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah. So, to be very clear, serious is not visible
in the night sky all year round. Due to the
Earth's orbit. Its visibility is going to be limited for
parts of the year or not going to be seen.
It's going to vary depending on your location and of
course which hemisphere you're in. In this serious is when

(46:17):
we've used this word already. It is a haliacal star,
a type of rise and set star. There are also
circumpolar stars that are always in the sky. Again, this
is all dealing with our own viewpoint, the window of
our sky, depending on where you are in the world.
And then there are the never rise stars that are
never above the horizon. Again for a particular viewer in

(46:40):
a particular place. It all depends on where you are
in the world. And this is all a matter of
terrestrial perspective and I guess object permanence. The stars are
still there whether you see them or not.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Right, But so, for example, if you're in the northern hemisphere,
the north star is always going to it's a circumpolar star.
It's always going to be visible all times of year,
always up there. But Serious is a star with a
haliacal rising and setting pattern. For some parts of the
year it will be visible above the horizon. For other
parts of the year of the year it won't. And

(47:15):
to be clear, there are parts of the year where
Serious is above the horizon and we would be able
to see it if not for the sun. But it's
above the horizon during the daytime, and the sun makes
it either invisible or difficult to see.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yeah, So in general, and again you know, it depends
where you are. But the basic way that it goes
down in the Northern Hemisphere for Serious is you have
peak visibility in winter when it's dominating the night sky,
and then during the spring it's going to fade away,
and then in the summer, like the earlier part of
the summer, it's invisible, it's completely washed out by the

(47:54):
sun's glare. And in the late summer and into autumn,
that is the reappearance, that is the aliacal rising, that
is the re emergence of Serious that you know, all
these different ideas end up becoming tied to right.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
So to clarify, when people talk about the dog days,
there are different ways of reckoning what those are. Most
of the time when people use the term informally, they're
just talking about the hottest part of summer, which in
the northern hemisphereal it's usually going to be July and August.
But if we're strictly following the astronomical definition where it
comes in the days following the Haliacal rising of Serious,

(48:32):
it's going to be after whenever that happens. But yeah,
it's not necessarily tied anymore directly to the hottest part
of the year. That is a historical coincidence that cemented
this connection with serious and heat.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Now, as we've been discussing, Serious has long been associated
with dogs, but also wolves, as i'll touch back on
a little bit later. In Chinese astronomy and astrology, it
is often called the wolf star, but it doesn't always
have connections to k Nines, particularly when we look at

(49:17):
the way the ancient Egyptians considered it. And we've touched
a little bit on this already, but for the ancient Egyptians,
Sirius was soft Debt. It was an aspect of the
goddess Isis, the daughter of Ray and the sister wife
of Asiris, and in this incarnation as Sopdebt, she served

(49:39):
as the harbinger of that coming crucial inundation of the Nile,
the Great flooding of the Nile, which we did whole
episodes on this in the past, so look those up
in the archives if you want to learn more. But basically,
the Nile floods and it overflows, and in doing so,
it waters these vital areas. They're going to row the

(50:00):
crops that will feed everyone. It is an essential time.
It is, you know, so much of the Egyptian view
of not only their lives but the universe is based
on this cycle.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yeah, connected to the fertility of Egyptian soil, the ability
of the Egyptian civilization to produce food crops and all. Yeah,
so incredibly important.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Yeah, you're just tied to to just even it leaches
over into these more you know, magical mythological ideas of
how life works and life flows, and this would occur
in summer, so you know, it ties in with serious
pretty perfectly. And she was envisioned as a woman with
a crown surmounted by a five pointed star, which you know,

(50:43):
I don't know that there's any connection here between this
and some of these descriptions we were discussing from Homer,
but I can't help but draw those comparisons here.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
Oh interesting, Yeah, the crown.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
Now, I was reading a little bit more in Geraldine
Pinches excellent Egyptian mythology book that we've referred to on
the show before, and then that points out that subdet
was later associated with the Eye of Ray, that Sirius
is also sometimes associated Sirius the star is sometimes associated
with Hathor as well. And you touched on this already,

(51:20):
but the appearance of Sirius slash subtet becomes very crucial
to the structure of the ancient Egyptian calendar because in
its earliest forms it was entirely lunar, and this would
require the addition of extra months when needed to balance
things out. And Holberg writes about this, and he writes
that quote the haliacal rising of Sirius serve the purpose

(51:43):
of synchronizing their lunar calendar with the solar year. If
the haliacal rising of Sirius occurred in the last eleven
days of the lunar calendar, the priests added an extra.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Month, interesting like a calendar reckoning value in a way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
Now, we mentioned already that for the Greeks, of course,
the star was simply the dog or the dog star
key to the constellation Canus major, the hunting dog of
the constellation Orion, representing the mighty hunter and son of Poseidon.
Though of note, in some cases Orion is said to

(52:22):
be the son of Poseidon. But there is another tradition
that holds that Orion is birth from a bull's hide
that had been buried in the earth after Zeus, Hermes,
and Poseidon all urinated in it, who making him a
son of three divine fathers and no mother other than
I guess you know, the flesh of the sacrifice bull. Wow. Yeah,

(52:45):
And there they're depictions of this, or depictions of like
the child emerging from the hide.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
I've read. I think this is true, that there's not
really anything close to a canonical version of the myth
of Oriyan like that. And in fact, we've interrogated the
idea that there can be anything like a canonical version
of Greek myths anyway, because you know, a lot of
this is just dependent on what sort of tradition enters

(53:13):
the text text stream at a certain time and becomes popular.
But you know, even given those caveats, it seems that
the story of Orion is lacking in a fixed, widely
accepted form.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
Is that right.

Speaker 2 (53:28):
That's kind of that's the vibe I got from from
looking into it. It's kind of like if you were
to ask, hey, who's Oryan, they would someone would just
point up and say, he's that guy. I mean, in
the next guy, he's the hunter. Like it. It it's
like one of the classics, right, It kind of predates
a lot of these other ideas. But yeah, he's handsome,

(53:48):
he has he has a club, he hunts, and he
has a dogs. Right oh yeah, yeah, major minor. So
we mentioned already you were talking about the references in
Homer's work where we have these definite, definite mentions of
the dog Star, and already you know, all the key

(54:11):
Greek connections are there in the way that Homer is
is invoking the dog Star, but he doesn't use the
term serious. Holberg gets into this and according to Holberg,
the earliest that we know of it, you know, surviving accounts,
and so for the forth that we know of the
word serious being used, it goes back to the seventh

(54:32):
century BCE when it shows up in the poem works
and Days by Hesiod. But it appears that the Greeks too,
were uncertain about the words origin. Possibly, it's been discussed
there are possible connections to the Greek sirios, meaning searing
or burning, but it may go much further back.

Speaker 3 (54:55):
It's not certain, but there are some pieces of evidence
that it might be a much older word, maybe something
that goes back even to like proto Indo European or something.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, yeah, that's what Holberg discusses, Yeah, that it might
ultimately be pre Greek Indo European in origin. He points
to the fifteen hundred BCE Hindu texts the Vedas, which
refer to sirius as and I may be mispronounced, likely
mispronouncing this, but tiaya and by and then quote and

(55:24):
by other variations that are also echoed in the ancient
Iranian Tistra. So if there is indeed linguistic relation here,
then the word sirius has a very old origin, you know,
ultimately lost to the prehistory of the Near East and
the Eastern Mediterranean, which is a very you know, I

(55:44):
think evocative idea. You know that knowledge of sirious and
even the words that we use to describe it, and
maybe some of the attitudes around it, like they're just
so deeply a part of what it is to be
human that we can point to no clear origin. Now,
he also discusses how there might be connections in Greek
thought to the phoenix, and this may be tied I

(56:08):
want to come back to the idea of the color
of serious. This may be tied to the mysterious way
that certain ancient authors, several multiple ancient authors, but notably Ptolemy,
Seneca and others, described it very specifically as a red star. Today,

(56:30):
if you look, if you're able to see Sirious in
the sky, where you look up images of it online,
you will note it is not red. It is white
or blue white, if anything. And so this has led
to a long standing question is there anything to this?
Were they actually observing a red star or is merely

(56:53):
is something lost in translation or in transcription? Is this
more of Is this more of a matter of literature
and linguistics than actual astronomy? Oh?

Speaker 3 (57:04):
Maybe, like, oh, what's a hot star that comes in
the summer. Maybe red things are hot like fire. I
don't yes, I don't know something like that exactly.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
And that is one of the I think the prime
ways of interpreting it is that ultimately it is called
red because they're already these very strong ideas of what
it means. So if you talk about the glow, the
red glow of serious, you're not really describing the color red.

(57:37):
You're talking about these red attitudes that are tied up
with it. In the same way if you were to
say the dark light of sirious, you know, as one
might be tempted to, and you know, today, if you're
writing about it, like you're doing horror story and you
wanted to invoke serious, you might talk about the dark
light of serious or the gray light of serious. Those
are not literal descriptions, but it maybe captures the vibe

(57:59):
you're going.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
For, emphasizes its qualities as a death star.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
Yeah, but I don't know. You get back into some
of the specific cases, and it does begin to sound
a little more confusing because the whole org outlines. In
the second century ce Ptolemy describes the color of six
different stars, and in these and He describes these six
different stars as being red in color, and they include

(58:25):
serious and of these five, he says, certainly are considered red,
but not serious, not today at any rate. So this
and some of these other references have led to the
long standing question of well, maybe what if it did
appear at red two thousand years ago? You know what,
what can change? What could actually be responsible for that

(58:46):
if it were the case?

Speaker 3 (58:48):
That is fascinating. Yeah, I mean this ptolemy thing would
make me. That shifts me to the other side, that
makes me think, well, maybe it probably was red.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, And that's been the whole back
and forth here, And Hobard does a great job of
outlining some of the major names that were involved in
the conversation. For instance, he points to seventeen sixty as
being a time when you saw an initial uptick and
interest in this sort of thing. And to be clear,

(59:17):
for a long time prior to this this was maybe
less of a topic because there was this idea that
the stars are fixed, like nothing is changing. And then
as we learn more and more about our universe we
begin to understand you actually things do change and things
move around and all these other revelations about our place
and the cosmos and its nature. But certainly by seventeen

(59:39):
sixty you had an amateur astronomer by the name of
Thomas Baker who wrote a paper discussing the different changes
that have taken place in the night sky since ancient descriptions,
with some stars fading or growing more luminous, others seeming
to vanish. And he asked the question, well, has anything
ever changed color? And he said, no, not really, with
the possible exception of serious And this paper didn't you know,

(01:00:03):
take off immediately, but you know, people would come in,
like suddenly, someone of the bigger name and more sway
in the world of astronomy would pick up on it
and say, you know, they might be onto something. And
then there's this guy named Thomas Jefferson Jackson who becomes
particularly interested in it. I don't have time here to
go into him, but he's a very interesting figure that
Hopberg outlines pretty much his whole career in brief because

(01:00:26):
he was a bit of like a rabble rouser in
the astronomy world, and you know, was big on sort
of you know, bringing up sort of provocative ideas and
tearing into them. You know, but he became particularly interested
in the idea, and then later on it also becomes
wrapped up in a similar question coming back to Homer

(01:00:47):
that I believe we've discussed at least in passing on
the show before. Maybe we've we've gone into it in
a bit more depth. But the passage concerning the wine
dark sea.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
A description that can provoke confus usion in modern readers
because most people today don't look at the sea, and
we wouldn't think to compare it to like the color
of wine. But there for some reason, this made sense
to Homer, this made sense to the original author, and
there are different ways of interpreting why it made sense
in its original context.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Yeah, everything from it being a metaphor based on wine
customs of the day to observations of the sunset on
the ocean, and even it has been it has been
hypothesized that it could even be color blindness on the
part of the author and say like maybe he just
didn't know it's just picking color. I don't know how
much I really cling to that idea, but I don't know.

(01:01:38):
You know, you have to consider all possibilities, I guess
when you're asking a question like this, But anyway, So
these two questions end up being brought like like, well,
if they're talking about a red sea and then you're
talking about a red star, like what are we missing here?
Like we're both things actually red or we just you know,
something changed in the due to the translation and the

(01:02:00):
transcriptions over time, because you know, nobody's dealing with like
the original copy of whatever. You know, an individual road
in most cases. But as Holberg discusses, when you dig deeper,
there are a lot of ancient descriptions of Sirius, particularly
in Greek and Roman, thought as either red or in
some way described with red imagery. So they may not

(01:02:23):
so they might not say, oh, it's red light, but
they might describe it as burning. They might describe it
as fire. There's even like a Norse example of it
being referred to as Loki's brand and so forth. And
then when you get into the Chinese accounts, Tang dynasty
writings provided descriptions of the Wolf Star either as being white,

(01:02:47):
which would seem to you know, completely set aside these
ideas that it's a different color. But also there are
some writings in Tang dynasty astronomy and astrology discussing how
it can shane color, and that it's change in color
means robbers might be expected. You know, there's some sort
of yeah, the boys of Summer are coming and they're

(01:03:09):
coming for your home. That's sort of But Holburg says
that on the whole, Chinese sources from the last two
thousand years seem to stick to the white color, so
there's actually less overall reference to any kind of red
serious situation.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Okay, so it's not like all ancient sources or depending
on how you classify Tang dynasty, it's not like all
pre modern sources call it red. That's like one strain
of descriptions, but other ancient sources or older sources call
it white.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
Yes, yeah, okay, yeah. So Holburg says that, okay, if
the star did in fact change color, the main modern
explanations that we can really look to include the following.
A big one that has been explored in the past
is the idea that it could have been interstellar dust.
So you could have had a cloud of interstellar dust
stirred up from the outer layers of a red giant,

(01:04:03):
and that if this were to pass between us and
the star in question, it could have dimmed its luminosity
and redened it. So the transit of a small cloud
like this seems possible. But on the other hand, he
points out that going totally, totally, going against this is
that we've never found evidence of this cloud because again,

(01:04:25):
everything's out there moving. We have just increasing ability to
see what is moving and where it has been and
where it's going, and thus far nobody's been able to
see evidence of a cloud like this that would have
been in the right place at the right time. And
then there's another counter argument, and that is that, Okay,
if a cloud like this were to pass between us

(01:04:47):
and our view of serious it wouldn't have just changed
its color. It would have dimmed it, and it would
have dimmed it so much that Sirius would not have
been the brightest star in the sky at this point.
It would have been a mundane star. And the color
they also has been, it has also been pointed out,
would not really have been discernible to the naked eye.
So you know, you're dealing again with pre telescopic observation

(01:05:10):
of the heavens. And would people really be saying that
much about it if it is technically a red star
but it is faint and nobody can really make out
the red color anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Yeah, he seems to cling more to the idea that
again it's descriptions based on red connotation. Again, we're talking
about a dog star, the dog star here and the
dog star. It brings to mind passion, heat, fire, and
so forth, and those are the words we end up
using to describe it. And maybe that gets that gets
translated and transcribed in ways that make it sound more

(01:05:47):
definite than it actually was.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
Yeah, there's blood too as a possible red connotation. I mean,
this is a couple of steps away, but I am
thinking about passages in literature that talk about the dog
days of summer leading to a stirring of blood, or
like in Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, you know, Shakespeare
talks about I think it's been Volio who says that

(01:06:10):
in the hottest days of summer, the mad blood is stirring.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Yeah, yeah, I mean all this made me think of
Cornt McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the evening Redness in the West,
which I didn't remember this, but there is a reference
at one point in the book. Too serious. Oh really, Yeah,
They're just there's this scene where some of the characters
are like trucking along, and there's reference to what the
stars are doing around them, and serious is pointed out.

(01:06:36):
But there is one more possible way of understanding these
ancient descriptions of the red star, according to Holberg, and
that is that it's just tied to the emergence of
Sirius on the horizon at dawn, which would have been
by many and many estimates, a fiery red place.

Speaker 3 (01:06:55):
Oh interesting, Okay, so.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
I'm going to read one more bit here from Holberg.
Here where he he mentions this, He says, quote, it
is well known that when the Sun is on the
horizon its sunset or sunrise, it appears both dimmer and redder.
This also applies to bright stars such as Sirius near
the horizon. The effect of the scattering of light by
the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere acts to both shift

(01:07:19):
the color balance of the light from a star and
to extinguish the light. Unlike interstellar dust, however, atmospheric reddening
is relatively much stronger, so that the amount of atmosphere
required to make serious appear as red as Arcterus or beetlejuice.

(01:07:39):
Let me say it one more time. Beetle Juice three
will only dim the brightness of Sirius by about an
entire magnitude or a factor of two point five. This
occurs within five degrees of the horizon, at which point
Sirius is still one of the brightest stars in the
sky and its reddish color can still be perceived by
the human eye.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
Oh okay, so that makes a lot of sense, this
reddening effect of appearing, you know, very low just above
the eastern horizon with the sun at dawn. That that
makes a lot of sense as to why that could,
uh yeah, could cause it to appear redder. I think
that that makes that makes sense to me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Yeah. That combined with the red ideas surrounding the dog Star,
I think those two to me feel like they maybe
work together to really explain a lot of this.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Yeah, a little bit of topical synesthesia contributing to the
redness from the from the horizon.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the atmospheric reddening so uh so, yeah,
I tend to lean that way after reading this material,
although I will mention the whole brog mentions that some
also say, hey what about serious Sea? Could could the
hypothetical serious Sea have played a role in this well,
I mean maybe, but again again there's no there's no
evidence for this, and I don't know there are any

(01:08:58):
like real strong ideas as to how this was have
been the case. Kind of a hypothesis resting on the
shoulders of another hypothesis here, love those.

Speaker 3 (01:09:08):
All right? Is that going to do it for part one?
We've definitely got more to say about Serious, The Dog
Star and the Dog Days of Summer. So if that's
it for the first time, please join us again next.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
Time, absolutely yes, And in the meantime, go ahead and
write in if you have thoughts about anything here. Do
we have any amateur astronomers or well, of course professional
astronomers out there. If you have any thoughts about Serious,
if you have images you would like to share with us,
write in. We would love to hear from you. Also
references to The Dog Star and other works of literature ancient, old, recent,

(01:09:43):
and current. We're up for anything. Just a reminder that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Mom.

Speaker 3 (01:10:00):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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