Starlore
Polaris and The Bears
Polaris also known as Stella Polaris - the Pole Star.
- Euclid in Phaenomena refers to a star which lies between the constellations known as the two Bears and revolves upon itself, without changing its place. This star is perhaps our Polaris, the star around which all the constellations appear to revolve (if you were at the North Pole). It is the star to which that imaginary line drawn through the center of the Earth (axis) points. But Polaris was not always the Pole Star. Because the Earth wobbles in its rotation, the Pole Star, over a period of 26,000 years will change .
- Ovid in the Metamorphosis 2, 410, tells of the beautiful Callisto of Arcadia who was changed into a bear by Juno, the ever-jealous and mean-spirited wife of Jupiter. One day, Callisto saw her grown son (Arcas) in the woods and rushed to embrace him. He, not knowing the bear rushing at him was his transfigured mother, would have killed her but for the intervention of Jupiter who turned Arcas into a bear too and placed them both in the vault of the sky. Juno, furious at what she perceives to be a circumvention of her punishment for Callisto, rages to the Oceans: "I forbade her to wear human form, - she and her hateful son are placed among the stars....Perhaps my husband means to take her to wife, and put me away! But you, my foster parents, if you feel for me, ... show it, I beseech you, by forbidding this guilty couple from coming into your waters." Naturally, the ancient ones obliged her and so the two bears, the great one and the little one, move around the pole but never sink beneath the ocean.
- Andras Cellerius in Harmonia Macrocosmica,
Amsterdam 1661, shows that by the 17th century, owing to
the Earth's wobble (and perhaps some relenting on the
part of Juno), the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, is
still circumpolar but the Great Bear, Ursa Major,
at least gets her feet wet once in a while.
- The Indians of North America also referred to these constellations as Bears.