Constellations and Memory
Constellations are mnemotechnical tools.
From the same source:
In explanation of the origins of these figures [the constellations], we are earnestly told by some modern encyclopedia articles that vaguely defined "primitive peoples," viewing the night sky, thought the star groups "looked like" such creatures, and they then named them accordingly and made up myths to explain how they got there . . .
When I look up at the grouping of stars called "Orion" I confess that I see nothing "like" a human hunter—and in fact I'm never sure which stars (beyond the basic pattern, which I can see readily) "belong" to Orion and which do not. Orion's dogs seem to me even less imitative of the shapes of dogs I have known. So, either "primitive people" (the Hellenistic Greeks!!) were a lot more easily satisfied with what constituted the likeness of a hunter and his dogs than I am, or something else was going on in their minds than recognizing earthly shapes in the skies.
Indeed, the makers of Aratus manuscripts, and other medieval encyclopedias of the constellations, seem to have felt it necessary to describe the individual constellations as star patterns first of all: patterns which were then keyed to a constellation's name by drawing a rough figure around them . . . These books, though made for students whose minds were as primitive as the minds of beginning students always are, do not counsel a student "now look up in the sky and find the dog." Instead they counsel "look in the sky for thus-and-so pattern of stars in thus-and-such position," the same way we do now . . .
But if the constellation figures are not imitative of some thing, even if it is only fantastical, then what are they for? What people needed from star charts was a way of quickly and unerringly picking out certain stars, for their position was essential in the conduct of daily life—to calculate the calendar, to navigate, to plant, to know when to do a host of things. And a great many random items, such as individual stars, are not retrievable, and so cannot be learned unless they are organized into patterns that allow people readily to find them. . . .
The purpose of organizing stars into constellation patterns is not "representation," but to aid human beings, needing to find various stars, to locate them by means of a recognizable pattern retrieved immediately and securely from their own memories. Constellations are mnemotechnical tools.
