Astrological Event Feared for Millennia Is Appearing Over the Sky in California
Since the dawn of civilization, humankind has looked to the stars for signs. Careful attention to the sky and the movement of celestial bodies has been a hallmark of our species since prehistory. Long before the development of advanced telescopes, computer models or space exploration, people understood that the stars had something to tell us, and that if we learned their language, they could reveal incredible secrets about the world around us. There is a reason ancient man constructed monuments in line with the stars. The sky was a map and a way to understand our place in the cosmos and the movements of the stars told us when seasons were changing, when the weather would change, when to plant and when to harvest.
The astronomical event that will soon be visible in the skies above California was observed across the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Greek and Roman writers associated its arrival with intense drought and scorching heat. A time when animals and people would be more prone to illnesses of the mind and body. When crops withered, time slowed, and wine spoiled in the cellars. Its arrival was heralded by a star Homer called a sign of evil, and it gave us a phrase you may not realize is older than the English language: the Dog Days.
The dog they reference is, of course, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which sits in the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. For thousands of years Sirius has been known as the Dog Star. The ancient Greeks were writing about its arrival centuries before the rise of Rome. The Romans called the period surrounding it dies caniculares, the days of the Dog Star. That name persisted long after the fall of the roman empire and eventually became the phrase we still use today.
It describes the strange period of late summer when time seems to loosen and the days become impossibly bright and hot. For part of each year, Sirius disappears into the glare of the sun. As Earth continues along its orbit, the star eventually becomes visible again low on the horizon just before sunrise. This first visible return is called its heliacal rising, and depending on your California latitude, it may be happening any day now.
For ancient observers, the return of Sirius became closely connected with the conditions they saw around them. The Dog Star appeared and the heat intensified. The land dried out and plants struggled. To the Greeks and Romans, Sirius was not simply marking this exhausting time of the year, they believed that the brightness of the star was causing it. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder wrote that when the Dog Star rose, “the seas are troubled, the wines in our cellars ferment, and stagnant waters are set in motion.” In his 37-volume Natural History, he recorded the changes Romans believed came with the rising of the Dog Star, from the behavior of plants and animals to the weather and human health.
Pliny would later die in an effort to rescue people trapped in the path of the eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. But Pliny was writing about a belief that was already ancient in his own lifetime. Nearly eight centuries earlier, Homer had written about Sirius in The Iliad. As Achilles approaches Troy, Homer compares the light flashing from his armor to the Dog Star, which he describes as the brightest star in the sky, but also an ominous one, bringing fever and madness to mankind when it rose. Enjoyers of Christopher Nolan may recognize Homer as the author of the The Odyssey.
We now know far more about the cosmos than we once did, and that Sirius does not add any measurable heat to the Earth. Its appearance alongside the hottest days of the year was a coincidence of the ancient seasonal calendar, and even that relationship has changed somewhat in the thousands of years since Homer and Pliny were watching the sky. Earth's axis slowly wobbles over time in a process called precession, shifting the relationship between the stars and our seasons. The heliacal rising of Sirius also depends on latitude and local conditions, which means there is no single morning when the Dog Star becomes visible across all of California.
But the Dog Days themselves have remained remarkably recognizable. Late summer in California still brings long stretches of heat and dry weather. Hills that were green in spring have now been toasted to a light golden-brown, and the excitement of early summer has transformed into long August afternoons where the heat can feel inescapable. So take comfort in the fact that people have been complaining about this season since they first put pen to paper, and maybe marvel at how our natural human language of signs and symbols can persist uninterrupted for thousands of years. The stars we watch are the same ones they watched, and we still complain about the heat.
More than 2,500 years ago, Hesiod described the arrival of Sirius during what he called the “season of wearisome heat.” After describing how people at this time were weakened by the sun and Sirius scorching their ‘heads and knees’, his advice for getting through the Dog Days is still just as applicable today. Find shade, drink wine, and stay hydrated!
Of the Dog Days of summer, he wrote: “But when the artichoke flowers, and the chirping grass-hopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.