Apollo’s Raven and Constellation Corvus
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The constellation Corvus represents the raven (or crow), Apollo’s sacred bird in Greek mythology. According to the myth, the raven originally had white feathers. In one story, Apollo told the bird to watch over Coronis, one of his lovers, who was pregnant at the time. Coronis had been unfaithful to Apollo; when he learned this information from a pure white crow, he turned its feathers black in a fit of rage. Read on below..
Another legend associated with Corvus is that a crow stopped on his way to fetch water for Apollo, to eat figs. Instead of telling the truth to Apollo, he lied and said that a snake, Hydra, kept him from the water, while holding a snake in his talons as proof. Apollo, realizing this was a lie, flung the crow (Corvus), cup (Crater), and snake (Hydra) into the sky. He further punished the wayward bird by ensuring it would forever be thirsty, both in real life and in the heavens, where the Cup is just out of reach.It’s so interesting the origin of these myths. Never in my life would I be able to look at a group of stars and create such detailed stories about it.
In those days people didn’t have TV and other forms of easy entertainment we have today. I guess looking at the stars and finding constellations was a way to pass time.
I kind of agree with what @Shreyasfc says. Like even if I did not have any entertainment, it would still need so much creativity to come up these myths!
Come on guys, every generation era of people has its own myths. Everything is imagined by human brain.
Ancient Greeks couldn’t explain weather through science, so they thought it was God-sent.
We still have this religious thing all over the world.
Only nature is real. Science is the next God and maybe in the far future, people will believe we were so idiot in believing to religion and call our modern religions outdated and “mythology”.
I can totally imagine people looking back and looking at modern religions and wondering how people could get so into it. They are so old fashioned even today, imagine in the future.
While on the subject of the weather, it was actually in Ancient Greece that Aristotle first turned Meteorology into a science of studying the weather, wrote a blog post about that here:
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