And what the Maya, Australian Aboriginals, and Chinese saw in the same stars
There is a story the Greeks told three thousand years ago, that the Maya carved into their temples across Mexico and Central America, and that the people of the islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea still tell today. They were all looking at the same corner of the sky. They all felt that something important was happening there. And every single one of them saw a completely different story.
That alone is enough to blow your mind.
But before we talk about what each culture saw, we need to talk about what that corner of the sky actually hides: a star so enormous that if you placed it where our Sun is, its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Mars. And right next to it, one of the oldest and closest star clusters that exists, visible through binoculars from your rooftop.
Let’s start from the beginning.
The humiliation Orion never saw coming
Orion was the most famous hunter in the world. Not just in his village, not just in his region. In the entire known world, nobody hunted like Orion. And he knew it. Oh, did he know it.
But before we talk about the scorpion, we need to talk about Artemis. Because without understanding Artemis, the death of Orion makes no sense at all.
Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. Virgin by choice, she had asked Zeus as a child to never force her to marry or belong to any man. Zeus agreed. Artemis hunted alone, with her nymphs, free from any ties. She was the only woman in Greek mythology who needed no one.
Until she met Orion.
Nobody knows exactly how they met. What every version agrees on is what happened next: Artemis, the goddess who had rejected every god on Olympus, started hunting with Orion. Every single day. Together. The only mortal that the most elusive goddess in the Greek pantheon had ever allowed into her world.
And that is exactly when Orion’s ego betrayed him.
Orion’s problem was never his talent. It was his mouth. Orion had a habit of bragging, out loud and in front of the gods, that he could kill any creature that existed on the face of the Earth. Any creature. No exceptions. And with Artemis by his side, his confidence had no ceiling.
Gaia, goddess of the Earth and mother of all animals, heard him. And decided enough was enough.
Here is the part nobody expects: Gaia did not send a monster. She did not call upon a dragon, or a giant, or any of the epic creatures from the Greek pantheon. She sent a scorpion. A small, ordinary, common scorpion. The kind of creature you accidentally step on in the garden.
The scorpion found Orion, the most powerful hunter in the known universe, and stung him on the heel. A single sting. End of story.
The humiliation was so perfect, so calculated, that the story took centuries to fade. There are other versions of Orion’s death, with different gods and different reasons, but they all end the same way: with the hunter defeated and Artemis devastated. Because it was she who asked Zeus to place Orion in the sky forever. Not as punishment. As tribute. It was the only thing she could do for him.
Zeus agreed. And unable to ignore the dramatic symmetry, he placed the scorpion on the exact opposite side of the sky. So Orion would never have to look upon his killer again.
That is why, from any point on Earth, Orion and Scorpius never appear together in the night sky. When one rises, the other hides. They have spent three thousand years refusing to look each other in the eye.
But that is only the Greek version. On the other side of the ocean, the same curve of stars was telling completely different stories.
The same sky, different stories
Before we continue, there is something worth pointing out: Scorpius is a fascinating exception in the history of cultural astronomy. Most Western constellations look nothing like what they are supposed to represent. Try finding a real bull in Taurus, or a virgin in Virgo.
Scorpius is different. The curve of bright stars with its raised tail and upward stinger genuinely looks like a scorpion. So clearly, in fact, that cultures with no contact between them, separated by entire oceans, independently reached the same conclusion: that is a scorpion.
Though some saw something else entirely.
The Maya: where the sky swallows the dead
For the Maya, the night sky was not a spectacle. It was a roadmap to the other world.
The Milky Way was the World Tree, the axis connecting the underworld to the heavens. And at the exact point where the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic, right where the Sun, Moon, and planets trace their annual path, was Scorpius.
That crossing was no accident for Maya astronomer-priests. It was the entrance to Xibalba, the underworld. The place where the Lords of Death ruled in eternal darkness.
When the Scorpius constellation appeared on the horizon during summer nights, it was the signal: the door was open. Not metaphorically. Literally open, according to Maya cosmology. The moment for rituals, for communication with the ancestors, for offerings that maintained the balance between worlds.
Researchers who have traced the Popol Vuh, the sacred Maya book of creation, discovered something astonishing: the story of the hero twins who descend into the underworld to defeat the Lords of Death follows the movement of these stars across the sky. The descent happens when Scorpius and the center of the Milky Way disappear below the horizon. The triumph and return coincide with their reappearance at dawn.
The Maya were not just telling stories about the sky. They were using the sky to preserve the most important story of all, written in movements that no one could erase or burn. They succeeded, at least in part, despite the Spanish destroying most of their codices in the sixteenth century.
The Torres Strait Islanders: the warrior standing in his canoe
Thousands of miles away, on the islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islanders looked at the same stars and saw no scorpion at all. They saw Tagai.
Tagai was a warrior and fisherman of great renown. One day he set out to fish with twelve men. When he returned to the canoe, he discovered that his crew had drunk all the water and eaten all the food for the voyage, violating the most basic laws of the sea.
Tagai, blinded by fury, killed them all.
Afterwards, with the rage cooling and the guilt arriving, he sent them to the sky. Six he placed in the Pleiades. The other six, in the belt of Orion. And he himself ascended, standing upright in his canoe.
That canoe is the stars of Scorpius.
Tagai standing over the curve of bright stars, a spear in one hand and sea fruit in the other, is a constellation that Torres Strait Islanders still use for navigation today. A figure of moral authority who killed his own crew, immortalized in the sky as a permanent warning:
The laws of the community are never broken. Never.
Three cultures with no contact between them. A scorpion, a portal to the underworld, a warrior standing in his canoe. Same stars.
The star that would make Mars disappear, and its secret neighbors
Now that you know what those civilizations saw in these stars, it is time to talk about what is actually there.
Antares: the star named after a planet and bigger than an orbit
The name says it all, though few people realize it at first. “Antares” comes from Greek and means “rival of Ares,” that is, rival of Mars. The Greeks named it that because its reddish-orange color is almost identical to the red planet. At certain times of year, Mars and Antares appear together in the southern sky and it is genuinely difficult to tell them apart with the naked eye.
Antares is a red supergiant. And when we say big, we need an analogy to make the number meaningful.
Our Sun has a diameter of about 865,000 miles. Antares has between 700 and 900 times that diameter, depending on the exact moment it is measured, because the star pulses and its size constantly changes.
Every calculation agrees on one thing: if Antares were where our Sun is right now, its surface would not just reach the Earth. It would pass the Earth. It would pass Mars. It would reach somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, swallowing the entire asteroid belt along the way. The whole Earth would be inside Antares.
And yet from here it looks like a bright red dot in the night sky of May and June. That tells you how far away it is: about 550 light-years. The light you see tonight left Antares around the year 1475, when the Aztecs still ruled Mexico and Cortés had not yet been born.
Antares is in the final stages of its life. In cosmic terms, it is an old and exhausted star that will at some point, nobody knows exactly when, explode as a supernova. When it happens, it will be visible in broad daylight from Earth for several weeks. The greatest spectacle any human being has ever seen in the night sky, and we will be here to witness it.
M4: the 12-billion-year-old cluster that fits in your binoculars
Just 1.3 degrees from Antares, so close they almost touch in the sky, lives M4. It is a globular cluster: a compact sphere of hundreds of thousands of stars orbiting our galaxy like an ancient satellite.
M4 is approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest globular clusters that exists and the easiest to locate from the northern hemisphere. It is about 12.2 billion years old. To put that in perspective: our Sun is 4.6 billion years old. The stars of M4 formed when the universe was young and our Solar System did not yet exist even as an idea.
What makes M4 remarkable is not just its age. It is that you can see it without being a professional astronomer or spending a fortune on equipment.
With 7×50 binoculars like the Celestron Cometron you can already make out the fuzzy patch of M4 next to Antares. But with 15×70 binoculars like the Celestron SkyMaster, the story changes completely: M4 becomes a real object, with texture, with clearly visible circular structure. It is no longer a smudge. It is a cluster.
You are looking at 100,000 stars three times older than our Sun, from your patio, with equipment that fits in a backpack.
The heart of the Azure Dragon
There is a third angle worth mentioning, because it connects with the Chinese astronomical tradition we have not yet explored, and it absolutely deserves its moment.
In classical Chinese astronomy, the stars of Scorpius formed part of the Azure Dragon of the East, one of the four celestial guardians. Antares had its own name: Huǒxīng, literally “fire star.” Together with the two stars flanking it, it formed Xin, the heart of the dragon. And in imperial court protocol, that same star represented the Emperor’s throne, with its neighboring stars embodying the Crown Prince on one side and the son of a concubine on the other.
An entire dynasty’s political hierarchy, projected onto the sky.
A star that for the Greeks rivaled a planet, for the Maya marked the gate to the underworld, for the Australians was a warrior’s canoe, and for the Chinese was the heart of a dragon and the throne of an emperor.
Same stars. Four completely different worlds.
So what do you see?
The next time you are outside on a clear night in May or June, look south. The curve of bright stars with that intense red dot at the center. You now know that red dot is a star that would swallow the orbit of Mars. You know that right next to it sits a ball of hundreds of thousands of stars, 12 billion years old, 6,000 light-years away. You know that curve has been a scorpion, a portal to the underworld, a canoe, and the heart of a dragon, depending on who was looking.
The sky did not change. Only the eyes did.
If you want to actually see it, not just imagine it, basic binoculars are enough to get started. And if you want a smart telescope to find M4 on its own, frame it automatically, and deliver a processed image in real time, we cover exactly that in our ASTRONOMIKA TV YouTube videos, where we observe live from a rooftop in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Frequently asked questions about the Scorpius constellation
What months is the Scorpius constellation visible?
Scorpius is visible in the northern hemisphere from May through August, with the best viewing in July when it reaches its highest point in the southern sky. In the southern hemisphere it is visible practically year-round, reaching its greatest height during the winter months of June and July.
Why is Antares called that?
Antares means “rival of Ares” in Greek, where Ares is the god of war known to the Romans as Mars. The star received this name because its intense reddish color is almost identical to that of the planet Mars. At certain times of year, both appear close together in the sky and are genuinely difficult to tell apart, even for experienced observers.
How big is Antares compared to the Sun?
Antares has between 700 and 900 times the diameter of the Sun, and its size changes because it is a variable star that pulses. If it were placed where our Sun is, its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Mars and reach the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The entire Earth would be completely inside the star.
Can I see M4 without a telescope?
With binoculars and a reasonably dark sky, yes. Locate Antares, the brightest and most reddish star in the constellation, and move your binoculars approximately 1.3 degrees to the west. M4 appears as a diffuse circular smudge. With higher-power binoculars like 15×70 you can begin to perceive its granular structure.
When will Antares explode as a supernova?
There is no precisely calculated date. Astronomers know that Antares is in the final stages of its stellar life and that at some point it will experience a supernova explosion. When it happens, it will be visible in broad daylight from Earth for several weeks. The uncertainty is genuine: it could happen in a thousand years or in a hundred thousand.
Did the Maya really have their own constellations?
Yes. The Maya developed a highly sophisticated astronomical system completely independent of the Greek system we use today. They identified constellations, tracked planets with remarkable precision, and linked celestial movement to their ritual calendar and mythology. The Scorpius region was especially important because it marks the crossing between the Milky Way and the ecliptic, which the Maya interpreted as the entrance to Xibalba, the underworld. Much of that knowledge was lost when Spanish conquistadors burned the Maya codices in the sixteenth century. What survived continues to astonish researchers.
Are there other versions of the myth of Orion’s death?
Yes, several. Greek mythology is not a book with a single official version: myths were told differently depending on the region, the era, and the poet telling them. The story of Gaia and the scorpion is the one that directly explains the constellation and the eternal separation between Orion and Scorpius in the sky. The other versions have their own dramas, but that is a conversation for another time.
Sources and further reading
Books
Ridpath, I. (2018). Star Tales. Lutterworth Press. Classic reference on the mythological origins of the constellations, with analysis of primary Greek sources.
Schele, L. and Freidel, D. (1993). A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. Harper Perennial. Foundational work on Maya astronomy and cosmology, including the role of Scorpius in the mythology of the Popol Vuh.
Norris, R. and Norris, C. (2009). Emu Dreaming: An Introduction to Australian Aboriginal Astronomy. Emu Dreaming. Introduction to the astronomical systems of Australian Aboriginal peoples and Pacific islanders.
Harney, B. Y. and Cairns, H. (2003). Dark Sparklers. Hugh Cairns. The most comprehensive record of the astronomical knowledge of the Wardaman people, including the stars of Scorpius in their initiation ceremonies.
Digital sources
NASA Science. Messier 4 (NGC 6121). science.nasa.gov. Official technical data on the M4 globular cluster including distance, age, and stellar composition.
Ridpath, I. Star Tales: Scorpius. ianridpath.com/startales. Detailed analysis of Greco-Latin sources on the constellation, including references to Eratosthenes and Ovid.
The Conversation. (2016). Kindred Skies: Ancient Greeks and Aboriginal Australians Saw Constellations in Common. theconversation.com. Peer-reviewed academic article on the connections between Greek and Australian Aboriginal astronomy.