Scorpio. ♏︎

Orion boasted that he would kill every animal on earth, and the earth took it personally. Gaia, in the usual telling, sent the scorpion; it stung the great hunter dead and was set among the stars for services rendered. Both parties went up, and the sky was arranged with unusual editorial care: they were placed on opposite sides of it.

The arrangement still runs. As Scorpius rises in the east, Orion lies down in the west, and the two are never in the sky together; the chase continues at one revolution per night, indefinitely. Aratus pointed to it as the constellations’ plainest piece of narrative: geometry doing the work of a moral.

GIR.TAB, the scorpion, is one of the few signs Babylon and Greece agree on completely; the creature crossed cultures without redesign. In Gilgamesh, scorpion-people guard the mountain gate where the sun rises, terrible and courteous at once. Something with a sting has watched the horizon here for as long as there are records.

Nothing else in the zodiac actually looks like its name: a long J-hook of bright stars with the sting curled at the end. At the heart burns Antares, ‘the rival of Ares’, a red supergiant named for out-reddening Mars, and Shaula, ‘the raised tail’, tips the hook. Even sceptics concede that the scorpion draws itself.

Sources: MUL.APIN I · Epic of Gilgamesh IX · Aratus, Phaenomena 634 · Catasterismi 7