The reasons are historical and not occult in the modern sense.
If you go back far enough you get the old Babylonian Empire where a lot of the northern contellations stemmed from. There is a ten thousand year old site in Turkey where zoomorphic images on stone that tend to coincide with the animals of the Zodiac (partiral root from 'zoo-' meaning animals). They go back to prehistory. The earliest known constellations.
The Babylonians knocked the Chaldeans and Akkadians on the head, and they themselves knocked each other on the head from time to time in respect to empires. Old Babylon inherited their "stuff" through conquest. Which came first, astronomy or astrology, is like a chicken and egg argument, however you can't do that latter without the former (classically, you had to know the star and planet positions to do the astrology mumblings, know there's probably more mysticism than actual astrometry).
Whether they stole it or invented it or both (stole and advanced) all that knowledge was available
Well, all sorts of Empires followed when the Babylonians were knocked on the head, Assyrian, Neo Babylonian, other Persian ones, and on like that. One of those had a leader who created the first known library about 2700 year ago. Every time someone knocked someone on the head and took over they inherited things, including cultural and knowledge amongst the looting and pillaging, tax collecting, and tithes and tributes from vassal states.
Then a bunch of bandits from Macedonia started doing eastern incursions until a few centuries later one guy led a bunch of them all the way to the Indus valley or further. He dropped dead, and had a tendency to destroy rather than collect (a bit like the modern era), but soon afterwards there was a Classical Greece related set of hegemony type stuff going on across that area.
You'll find that a lot of the scholarly Greeks travelled amongst these regions, it is often stated in their potted biographies, and picked up the knowledge from these newly conquered lands.
Remember the local population invariably outnumbers the invading occupiers by a large number so no matter how dedicated the invaders are they can't destory everything and some less obvious things get ignored. Unlike modern times, plus the tendency in the past thousand years to destroy things based on the occupied having a false religion, and astronomical science and clerical scholars were often the same no matter what religion (cleric actually comes from old European nations tending to have only the Clerics educated, able to read and write and add up).
A couple of centuries after this assimilation along comes Hipparchus, for instance, who likely didn't make up his astronomy from whole cloth but inherited it from merging lots of old data from various provenances, from centuries of regional powers knocking each other the head.
And most of the inherited constellation names and shapes in the northern and some of the southern hemisphere come from their MYTHOLOGY, it is more mythology than occult in the modern sense. The Classic Greeks ran Egypt and the modern Pharaoahs and people like Cleopatra (the ninth I think there were lots of Cleopatras) were actually Greeks who adopted the Egyptian ways to some extent, including marrying the siblings at times. This should be no great surprise, as Greek Mythology and their plethora of gods is replete with naughty goings on, which is also reflected in the constellations named after god or god related figures from their mythology.
So, that's mostly constellations, there's no occult unless you make it occult, which is usually some current era borrowing ancient cultures' mythologies in order to spookify things.
Algol, though, that's a star.
Well a few centuries or so after Hipparchus, when the Romans had in their turn knocked the Greeks on the head and took Egypt to be their wheat basket, Ptolemy turned up and amongst other things he used were Hipparchus's astronomy, and that was laid down in much writing (there were a lot of Ptolemys by the way, some Pharoahs, over time).
A few hundred years after that a new religion was started in the Arabian Peninsula, in a short time secular politics and this new religion became inexorably intertwined and they decided to go out and share their believes. Such sharing is usuall terms conquest.
The Roman Empire effectively split into two, the western one effectively having been dead by that time, and the eastern one surviving around another thousand years before being knocked on the head by the Arabs. Initially the Arabs left locals to their own thing and did not demand conversion and even made special allowance for the indigenous populations to still worship in their own religions. The same can't be said for the European religion. Everyone should have expected the eventual Spanish Inquisition. The Arabs too became more rigid over religion over the centuries, whether the Europeans caused or accelarated that by attacking them, I don't know enough history to say. They all found one little city very holy, ironically this little city was originally declared holy by a small group of local peoples who hadn't been free in a very long time, but as their religions came from the same religion as that one it was a triply holy city and everyone wanted to own it, up to this very day.
The western end had a unifying religion too, under one leadership for at least another thousand years, and they tended to inherit the Roman-Greek writings as their religion had started whilst the Roman Empire was still young and one polity, and the Romans tended to follow the Classical Greek culture for such things. Hence the constellations being adopted by the West and Northwest of Europe, amongst others.
Now the Arabs in the end went east and west to extremes of landmasses, in order to share their religion or conquer and accrue power and wealth, reader decides. The former is often an excuse for the latter, and here religion means "way of thought" and does not necessarily have to have a set of gods involved, but can make a very pious and justified excuse for walking over a border, usually in order to "save" the non-believers.
Still, in the end, and including the slow assimilation of the Byzantine Empire (which is what the Eastern Roman Empire had become) until totally subsuming it half a thousand years or so ago they inherited a lot of Greek learning going back 2000 years, and this learning had been added to by the Greeks before stagnation and that went back about a thousand years or so in recorded history, and probably farther before.
So the Arabs translated the Greek classics found in their subsumed territories and started advancing from that in the terms of their own mathematics and astronomy. Mathematics, as opposed to the basic arithmetic needed for mercantile trade and business, and astronomy and architecture were intimately reliant on each other for development in those days, and before, and even today although mathematics has a larger domain.
The Arabs weren't allowed to anthropomorphise idolatry, hence the decorations in their religious buildings are purely geometric with know representations of people like in Ancient Rome and Classical Greece and the then Europe.
They went around assimilating and advancing knowledge. Ancient knowledge and for astronomy more importantly ancient data were inherited. Whether they kept the constellation names I'm never sure, I doubt it.
For the noteworthy point is that most of our current long standing starnames come from their language.
For example Algol, Alkaid, Alkalurops, Albireo, Algedi, Althis, Althat and Altheother. Many other star names also started with Al, which effectively means 'the', but know drop the preceding 'the', whilst others still have it in the middle of the name, as in Betelguese and the semilegendary Zubenelgenubi, amongst others - 'el' is another transliteration of 'al' from the Arab to Roman alphabet. This includes mistransliteration as well, Betelguese would be Yetelguese if not for that as it was 'Ya' in Arabic but mistransliterated to 'Ba' via misreading. Arabic letters are somewhat subtle in their differences to Western European eyes.
Part of the Arab western move got to the Atlantic Coast of North Africa. Fortunately the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula could be seen on a clear day, so the Arabs invaded that. This led to some cultural exchange, especially when the Europeans there, under their religion, threw out the Arabs their, under their religion.
This again left many learned texts. This in combination with trade from places like the Italian Peninsula, the seat of the old Roman Empire, with the Eastern Mediterranean, eventually led to Arab writing based on the Classical Greek writings being assimilated in Western Europe. Unfortunately the religion there was somewhat dogmatically into an early Greek "philospher", the guy who taught the guy who invaded all the land where all those ancient middle east and eastern empires had been that had inherited, assimilated and synthesised together all the knowledge (usually through knocking each others empire on the head over time) going back to prehistory. Thus a Pole decided it to not publish his learnings and advances therefrom about the motions of planets he got from Greek learning and thinking on his own (although few correctly state that he never believed in it physically but more as a mechanism that worked for making the numbers not need fudging) until after he'd died, especially as he was an official in the religion who held this ancient philosphers teachings paramount amongst all others. Possibly because the Greeks evangelicised that religion more enthusiastically than most in the early days of that religion.
And after that had built up steam there came this thing in mostly Western and Central Europe called the Rennaisance, which read new translations of these Arab works translated from the old Greek, which was translated from the old Persian (more properly Assyrian) and Babylonian, which itself would have come from ancient translations of Chaldean and Akkadian work, admittedly all being added to along the way. This was good, as that ancient philosopher talked an exceptional amount of rot, and although ostensibly invented logic it must be remembered that logic depends on the things the prepositions are based upon (humans have cells, vegetables have cells, humans are therefor turnips). Granted he experimented a bit but it is not what you would call the scientific method. This led to so called "Natural Philosophy" and a lot of the demonstrably true knowledge was mathematical, especially geometric, so astronomy had a bit of a head start, helped by the recent invention of sticking two bits of glass at the end of a tube.
And as that was the source, and the constellations had been more or less kept since the Greeks due to the Western Religion but the Greek updates in science from some thinkers besides Aristotle were new information, especially again in astronomy, and the Arab works used Arab names for the starnames, which were inherited with few non Arabic starnames up until this century being used, especially in the northern constellations, most of the latter being inherited from the Classical Greeks who loved their naughty mythologies, based on the pervy goings on of their gods mostly, and transferred them to the sky patterns, however some of these sky patterns were long known in that area of the world prior to themselves, and retained their naming with just the Greek interpretation placed over them instead of what the original ones were. Examples include the Zodiac constellations and the Great Bear.
So Draco and the 48 mostly northern constellation comes from an old Greek list put down from Ptolemy, a Roman citizen of Greek descent but from Greek civilisation Egypt, taken from a list by Eudoxus, a Greek who put it it down half a thousand years earlier, and they stuck. Similarly Hydra came from the same list. Classical and Ancient Greek mythologies go along with their naming. These were in many ways inherited constellations from earlier Tigris-Euphrates Valleys civilisations via ciruitous routes and roots mostly because of conquest.
Meanwhile the alpha star in each of these constellations come from Arabic names because they added names to stars (formerly stars would have been named things like "first amongst" or "brightest" or alpha etc, or of "the first magnitude" meaning the most important but becoming to mean brightness nowadays. Alphard, or alpha Hydrae, means "The Individual" (there's that 'the' again), and indeed it often shines lonely between the horizon and below and off the end of Leo in Spring, I actually find it a pleasant naked eye pleasure when its season comes around again, but in those terms Fomalhaut is the favourite because it is lower and often behind buildings at these latitudes - not the 'the' again in the middle of that name). Meanwhile the alpha star in Draco, alpha Draconis, is not as bright seeming as Eltanin in the head of Draco, and asterism sometimes called 'The Lozenge', but is from the Arabic for large snake.
Or in other words, constellation and star names have sod all to do with the occult.
The reasons are a consequence of history with the constellation names set in the roots of a past mythological layer placed often atop star patterns inherited from ancient Mesopotamian cultures (independed constellation patterns, if they exist at all, often bear no relation to the images in the modern constellations, and indeed can be made up of stars form more than one modern constellation and have more constellations are the groupings are broken up more at times - eg constellations harping all the way back to the original Indus or Yangtze Valleys' civilisations. Whilst star names were added by the Arabs who had a religious edict against using human images at times and against the idolatry of other gods but their own single god and tended to use animal names instead, often domestic. The little asterism "The Kids" is the little group of stars in a triangle next to Capella (goat, little female goat, which is from the Latin for once) with epsilon Aurigae being called Almaaz, from the Arabic for "the Billy Goat", derived from a translation of the work of Ulugh Beg. Although the other two are named "the kid" I and II from the Latin, the Arabs took the hint for it fitted to their naming lore. This isn't always consistently logical, for instance beta Aurigae is called the 'left shoulder of the rein holder' via Arabic, Menkalinen, as from Romano-Greek tradition the constellation of Auriga is the "Charioteer".
No occult was used in the naming of these objects, they come from myth originally and went on form that.
In Chinese Empire names for constellations and stars you get things like (not direct quote) the three royal carriages for asterisms or constellations with star names like the first courtier and the second courtier etc.
Edited by archival, 08 June 2025 - 09:58 AM.
