What’s this?! MORE myth!?!

Yup. Onwards and upwards…

7) Hydra: Since we now know a bit about Herakles, I think it might be nice to tie in his second labour, that of the slain hydra. If you’ve ever heard of the hydra, you’ll surely remember that it represents a best with many head and that the main rule that goes along with the creature is that every time one of its heads is severed off, two new heads grow back in its place. Potentially problematic, I’d say. However, although Herakles was never really thought to be all that bright, his ways of slaying beasts seems to have been quite clever in my opinion. In this case, Herakles enlisted the help of another bay, his nephew, cauterize the stump after he’d decapitated one of the many hydra head, thus disabling its ability to grow two more. He then buried the heads underground so they would never pose a problem again.

 As you can see, the constellation of Hydra actually depicts a long, dragon-esque creature. This might simply be because the Hydra was sometimes referred to as the great water snake. 

8) Orion: Orion was bestowed with the characteristics of the world’s greatest hunter. With a few different perspectives of the myth, his heritage changes somewhat, yet it is mostly agreed that whether his parents were Queen Euryale and Poseidon or the parentless gift to a lowly peasant from Zeus, Poseidon and Hermes, its mostly agreed that he was given the gift of incredible hunting skills, and some other skills that make him a bit ‘showy’ if you ask me (walking on water, incredible strength etc…). In any case, he was also said to have been a skilled blacksmith and to have built great temples to the Gods in his lifetime. Its also said that he had a bit of a fling with Artemis, the chaste God of fertility and the hunt. Two stories are told about this- one that Apollo, worrying for his sister’s chastity, tricked her into shooting Orion while he was at sea, killing him. Another version has Apollo simply sending a scorpion to kill Orion, which leads us to…the next blog!

Aha! A cliff hanger, I know! Stay tuned my plentiful avid fans…

-StarKid