Aries. ♈︎

The ram enters the story as a rescue vehicle. Phrixus and Helle, children of a Boeotian king, are about to be sacrificed on the scheming of their stepmother when their mother Nephele sends a winged ram with a fleece of gold to carry them away. It flies east. Somewhere over the strait between Europe and Asia, Helle loses her grip and falls: the Greeks called that water the Hellespont, Helle’s sea, ever after.

Phrixus lands in Colchis, at the far edge of the known world. What follows is the myth’s cold arithmetic: the ram that saved him is sacrificed to Zeus, its golden fleece hung in a grove of Ares and set under a sleepless dragon. The ram itself is placed among the stars. A generation later Jason sails the Argo east to steal the fleece, and the most famous quest in Greek literature is, at bottom, the retrieval of this animal’s skin.

The Babylonians who drew the zodiac saw no ram here. Their name for this stretch of sky was LU.HUN.GA, the Hired Man, a seasonal farm labourer: the constellation of spring work. The ram is a Greek overlay on a Mesopotamian ledger entry, and the substitution tells you most of what you need to know about how the zodiac travelled: the co-ordinates were kept, the stories were swapped.

Aries is a modest constellation: a bent line of three or four stars, of which Hamal, ‘the lamb’ in Arabic, is the brightest. Its fame is positional. When the zodiac was fixed, the spring equinox sat here, and astronomers still call that point the First Point of Aries even though precession has long since carried it into Pisces. The sign begins the zodiac for the same reason the Hired Man showed up in Babylon’s ledgers: this is where the year’s work begins.

Sources: MUL.APIN I · Ps.-Eratosthenes, Catasterismi 19 · Aratus, Phaenomena 225 · Hyginus, Astronomica 2.20