Aquarius. ♒︎

The cupbearer was headhunted. Ganymede, a Trojan prince and the most beautiful of mortals, was tending sheep when Zeus’s eagle carried him off to Olympus to pour for the gods: an appointment with no notice period and no end date. His father received golden mares in compensation; the eagle received a constellation next door.

Greece attached the story to a figure that was already pouring. The water-bearer tips his jar and a stream of faint stars actually falls from it, down toward the mouth of the southern fish. It is one of the few signs where the picture does something: a permanent act of libation, mid-pour for twenty-six centuries.

To Babylon this was GU.LA, the Great One: Ea again, god of the deep, with vases overflowing at each shoulder. The whole neighbourhood was called the Sea, the sky’s water-country, because the Sun crossed it in the rainy months. The Greeks changed the pourer; the pouring, and the season it marked, they left exactly where they found it.

Start at the Water Jar, a tight Y of four stars balanced on the ecliptic, and follow the stream south until it ends at bright, lonely Fomalhaut, the fish’s mouth. The two named stars nearby are Sadalmelik and Sadalsuud, ‘the luck of the king’ and ‘the luckiest of the lucky’: the old astrologers considered the Sun’s stay here a good month, and named the furniture accordingly.

Sources: MUL.APIN I · Homer, Iliad 20 · Catasterismi 26 · Hyginus, Astronomica 2.29