If you go back far enough, before streaming services, before black and white flickering televisions, before radios the size refridgerators, people would look at the stars, follow their paths in the sky above, and tell each other stories.
And one of the oldest stories we know is that of the Cosmic Hunt.
Archaeoastronomy is the interdisciplinary study of how ancient cultures understood and used celestial phenomena within their worldviews, their culture. Phylogenetics is a scientific method of tracing stories across cultures and time.
Drawing from both these disciplines, we can see how our northern European ancestors tracked the path of Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) across the sky and created a story that explained the diminishing day light and the eventual return of the sun. Though it varies by culture, often, the handle of the Dipper represents a hunter chasing an animal embodied by the remainder of the constellation.
Due to constellation drift, the slow, gradual shifting of star patterns over millennia, changing their shape, and the Earth’s axial wobble, which shifts the backdrop of stars, and alters the position of constellations, the Cosmic Hunt does not have the same dramatic, visual climax our ancestors would have witnessed. But we still see and feel the effects of an ever darkening sky and we, too, long for the return of the light.
If you are out on a clear evening, maybe look in the northern sky for the Big Dipper as it sits close to the horizon. And remember the story that our ancestors told around a warm fire as they looked up into the dazzling, starry firmament.
One morning a man is walking through the forest carrying with him his spear for hunting and a pot for cooking. He has gone many days without eating more than what little he could forage, and he is very hungry.
At the foot of the mountains, he sees a deer drinking from a stream. He sees that it is a mother deer and he tells himself that he can hunt this animal. He gets as close as he can without scaring the deer and throws his spear. But the deer has heard him and is startled. She jumps and runs up the mountain, higher, higher in her fear. As she does this, she catches the sun in her antlers, scaring her even more, so that she continues to run across the mountain tops, running away as fast as she can, and taking the sun with her.
The man picks up his pot and his spear and chases after the deer, up the mountain, and across the tops of the mountain range. All the while, the sun is trapped in the deer’s antlers, and it moves closer and closer to the horizon, making the days shorter. The man knows he must stop the deer. The sun can not be lost forever. There could be no more daytime.
Eventually, the man gets close enough to the deer to throw his spear once more. His aim is true. The mother deer, in a desperate attempt to avoid the the throw, jumps one last time high into the sky. The sun falls from her antlers, falls behind the mountains and disappears. Day turns to night.
But the mother deer did not jump fast enough and as the fatal throw takes her life, it releases the magic of the sun which still lingers around the deer. And as she lays on the ground dying, she turns into the stars in the night sky and the magic of the stars consumes the man and turns him also into a star, chasing her, pot at his side and spear mid throw.
If you look into the sky throughout the year, you will see the man chasing the deer across the stars, until winter when she lays on the ground fatally wounded. Yet the mother deer is a special creature and she has given birth to a calf during her escape. No doubt that calf will be seen wandering by the mountains when the days get longer again as the sun returns to the sky. And so with this, it allows the hunt to carry on.
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