This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

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 are back with the fourth and I think for now, final part in our series called Dog Days and Death Stars, where we've been talking about the concept of the dog days of summer, which in ancient times were linked to the heliical rising of the brightest star in the night sky,

Sirius, known to the Greeks as the dog star.

If you are just now jumping in with this episode,

I think you should probably go back and listen to the other three parts in the series first.

We've already covered a lot of ground, and we will keep referring back to that in this episode.

But for a brief recap, in part one of this series, we talked about invocations of the dog days and of serious in poetry, music, and ancient literature, like the Iliad, where in the Iliad, the dog star was a dual symbol of both brilliance and death.

And we discussed the star Sirius A itself, why it's the brightest star visible from the Earth, apart from the sun, of course, how long it has been and will be the brightest in our sky, how the time of its rising has shifted over the course of human history and why

some ancient astronomers might have believed that the light that issued from it was red.

We also talked about Don Henley a good bit in that episode.

And in part two, actually, Don Henley's been a recurring theme.

So in part two, we talked about the imagery and narrative associated with Sirius and its constellation, Canis Major, across different cultures.

Often it is a dog or a wolf.

Sometimes it's not.

Sometimes it's other things like a bow and arrow.

We also talked about the historical misconception that the dog days of summer actually somehow caused rabies in dogs.

And then we got into the discovery of the actual cause of rabies and the development of the rabies vaccine.

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