Cancer. ♋︎

The crab has the shortest and worst job in mythology. While Heracles fought the Hydra in the swamp at Lerna, Hera, who hated him, sent a crab to pinch his foot. It did. He crushed it and went back to the fight. That is the whole myth: a walk-on part in someone else’s labour, over in a sentence.

Hera paid her conscript anyway, with a place in the zodiac, and the ancients enjoyed the fine print: it is the faintest of the twelve, a patch of sky with no bright star in it. The crab got the honour and the sky’s cheapest real estate at once. Loyalty rewarded, but at the minimum rate.

Babylon’s tablets call this stretch AL.LUL, the crayfish, and at Dendera in Egypt it is drawn as a scarab, the beetle that pushes the sun. Something armoured has always lived here, and for good reason: when the zodiac was drawn, the Sun stood in these stars at midsummer, at the top of its road. The Tropic of Cancer still keeps the name, though precession has long since moved the solstice on.

What Cancer lacks in stars it repays in one object: Praesepe, the Manger, a cluster visible as a smudge of cloud between two stars the Greeks called the donkeys. Aratus made it a weather glass: if the Manger goes missing on a clear night, rain is coming. Galileo aimed his telescope at the smudge in 1610 and counted it into forty stars.

Sources: MUL.APIN I · Aratus, Phaenomena 892 · Catasterismi 11 · Hyginus, Astronomica 2.23