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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'm Joe McCormick.

And we're back today with the third part in our series called Dog Days and Death Stars.

In these episodes, we have been looking into the history of the so-called Dog Days of Summer and the astronomical body from which the dog days get their name.

That is the Dog Star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. In the first episode of this series, we talked about

misconceptions about where the phrase dog days of summer comes from. We talked about the origins

of the dog days tradition and the astrology of the ancient

Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who believed that what's called the heliical rising of

Sirius, the time when the star is first visible in the sky on the eastern horizon just

before dawn, that the timing of that in the mid to late summer triggered important effects on earth, both

positive and negative. It seems like the associations were mainly positive for the Egyptians,

thinking of it as the beginning of the Nile inundation season, which is very important for the

ancient Egyptian agricultural cycle and in ancient Egyptian religion, whereas the associations tended to be more mixed or even more negative for the Greeks who believed that the rising star brought these deadly rays of heat and also brought fevers and plague and omens of doom.

So we talked pretty extensively about the invocation of the dog star in the Iliad of Homer,

who repeatedly uses it as this dual image of both brilliance and destruction as a kind of death star,

in the words of Jay Holberg, an author whose book we've been referring to in this series.

And that's kind of fitting given that it is actually both the brightest star in the Earth's

night sky and that the Greeks thought that it literally had the power to inflict harm on mortals through its rays.

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