Life would be a lot easier if I could borrow God’s paintbrush and cover up seven stars. I’ve been sent another interpretation of the Sky Disc of Nebra. This time the seven star cluster is the constellation Orion. The clue was that the three stars through the centre were not quite in a straight line.

Orion on the Nebra Disc?
Orion on the Star Disc of Nebra?

I’m not convinced.

The problem is that Orion is such a recognisable constellation and a fairly simple one to find in anything random. If you’re convinced a site has an astronomical feature then three things in a line must be a celestial alignment. If they’re not quite in a line, it’s not because accuracy wasn’t important. It’s because they were tracing Orion. The result is you can find Orion in all sorts of places.

What makes this more awkward is that some of these places might have been meaningfully constructed to reflect Orion in some way. I’ll concede it is a prominent constellation. But how can you test the difference between an Orion alignment and sheer chance. If you have historical evidence then there’s some corroborating information. However this isn’t possible for prehistoric sites.

A further difficulty is that recognisable features like Orion are used throughout the year. It would be hard to build a case for a festival being connected to the Pleiades at a specific time of year in Greece. Not because the Pleiades weren’t used. Quite the opposite. They were used as a marker for all four seasons. It’s likely Orion was used in a similar way in many societies. Whenever you have your event Orion is either high in the sky, rising in the morning sky, setting in the evening sky or temporarily obscured by the Sun.

This re-use of the constellation complicates things further when you look at the myths of Orion. In Greek myth Orion is connected with many deities because it’s visible in the sky at the same time as different constellations in different seasons. It’s even connected through myth to Scorpio on the opposite side of the sky, who is said to be chasing to Orion. If you have an Orion theory to push then the temptation is to pull out the connections that fit your own ideas and conveniently ignore the rest. But with no a priori reason to do this, you’re effectively just cherry-picking evidence.

This means that any ideas built on the behaviour of Orion are built on sand. Without corroborating evidence for any Orion connection you find, it’s simple to find two contrary alternatives. It’s ironic but the prominence and plausibility of the use of Orion that makes it so much more difficult to argue for specific use of the constellation than other, more obscure, constellations.