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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back the second part in our series on the Dog Days of Summer and the Dog Star serious from which the Dog Days get their name. So in part one of this series, we started off talking about childhood recollections of hearing this phrase,

the dog days of summer, without knowing what it meant or where it came from.

And it turns out that the dog days do not get their name from the image of dogs panting in the heat, but instead from the astrology of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, who linked the hottest part of summer to the heliical rising of the star Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, and the brightest star in the constellation, Canis Major, which the Greeks and Romans linked to the mythic huntsman Orion,

the Canis Major and Canis Minor were Orion's hunting dogs.

So many ancient peoples thought that when Sirius rose in conjunction with the sun,

when this helical rising happened in the middle or late part of summer, the star added its heat to the heat of the sun.

So it's like turning on a second burner under the pan, and this is what made the weeks of midsummer dangerously hot.

Last time, we also talked a lot about the meaning of the dog star in ancient literature, such as the Iliad, where Homer repeatedly invokes it as a symbol of both brilliance and radiance, but also as a death star, an omen of doom and destruction.

And we got into the use of the dog days of summer in other poems and songs as well, including some digressions about Don Henley and Dylan Thomas.

I guess the Don Henley reference is indirect.

It's not a direct quote, but, you know, Boys of Summer and that's got a lot of dog.

Gets into some of the same vibes.

Yeah.

Yeah, dog days in it.

And then we also discussed the dog star as a star,

Sirius A, which is actually part of a binary star system with the smaller white dwarf,

Sirius B. We got into a number of fascinating things about the star itself and the

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