Star Stories: Constellations and People by Anthony Aveni

Author:Anthony Aveni [Aveni, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Folklore & Mythology, nature, Sky Observation, history, World
ISBN: 9780300249095
Google: jBazDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-10-22T00:24:38.333524+00:00

7

Star Patterns in the Tropics

Have you ever noticed that Scorpius’s tail looks like a hook, especially when it rises in the southeast? Hawaiians call it Maui’s Fishhook. Maui was a mythical hero, a fisherman who loved casting his line in the coral reefs below Mount Haleakalā, which is all that once existed of the islands. But Maui was never very good at securing a catch, and his brothers would often tease him about his failures. What they didn’t know is that Maui possessed a magic fishhook, though he kept it a secret and saved it for important uses.

One day Maui decided to play a trick on his brothers. He deliberately caught his magic hook on the ocean bottom. “Paddle as hard as you can,” he told them. “Looks like I’ve got a huge fish.” As they did, Maui hauled up a large island, the island of Maui. His brothers were so busy paddling they didn’t even notice. So Maui repeated the trick and pulled up another, even bigger island—Hawaii. Then another, Oahu; then Kauai; then Lanai; then Molokai, Niihau, Kahoolawe, and Nihoa. And that’s where the Hawaiian Islands came from.

Another version of the story continues to a different ending. In it, Maui does his fishing off the coast of the big island, and he orders his brothers not to look back, lest the expedition fail. When a bailing gourd appears on the water, Maui instinctively reaches out for it and places it next to him in the boat. Suddenly a beautiful water goddess materializes. His brothers can’t resist turning around to gaze at her, and as they do, the fishing line goes slack and all the islands Maui’s brothers have hauled up from the deep sea sink back partway. That’s why Hawaii is a chain of islands instead of a single large land mass.

One day Maui’s mother complained that the days were too short: there wasn’t enough daylight to dry her clothes. “Why is the sun moving so fast?” Maui set out to solve the problem by capturing the sun. When he did, however, the sun begged to be let off the hook, promising to slow down and make the summer days longer. You can see for yourself that the promise is still kept. There’s Maui’s hook adjacent to the spot in the zodiac where the sun passes in predawn midwinter skies, portending longer days. That’s the place where the sun gets hooked every year.

There’s a big difference between Maui’s Hawaiian sky and that of the Arctic dwellers we encountered in the previous chapter. To see it, head south from Inuit territory, where the Pole Star stands 70 degrees high in the sky and stars gradually lift off the ice fields in the east and set at equally low angles in the west. Halfway to the equator, at latitude 45 degrees north (where southern Europe, the northern United States, and northern China lie), star trails make 45-degree angles with the horizon, and Polaris lies halfway between the skyline and the overhead point.

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