The Seba library treats Sirius in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Kerényi, Carl, Kerényi, Karl, Edinger, Edward F.).
Careful calculation has shown that the orientation of the palaces on Crete was determined by Sirius. Sirius also determined an annual rite reported from the Greek period of the island.
Kerényi establishes Sirius as the structural foundation of Minoan-Greek calendrical religion, governing both architectural orientation and annual ritual practice.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
WHEN IN EGYPT the early rising of Sirius became the beginning of the year, the approach of a better season could be foreseen by the first swelling of the Nile. Yet this was also the time of the most dangerous heat: a highly ambivalent season!
Kerényi articulates the core ambivalence of Sirius as a symbol of both renewal and lethal danger, structuring the seasonal mythology of Egypt, Crete, and Greece.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
Aristaios, who belongs to the next cultural stage, that between honey and wine, commanded that on Keos the rising of Sirius be greeted with a dance of warriors, but at the same time he did everything possible to attenuate the harmful influence of the dog star.
Kerényi shows that the rising of Sirius occasioned specific apotropaic ritual—warrior dance and protective magic—reflecting the star’s status as a numinous force requiring propitiation.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
The natural phenomenon ushering in a great festival for the early rising of Sirius, an ancient New Year’s festival, was raised to the level of a myth of zoe: an awakening of bees from a dead animal.
Kerényi links the heliacal rising of Sirius to a myth of regenerative life (zoe), demonstrating how astronomical observation was mythologized as death-and-rebirth symbolism.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
The festival of his arrival fell in the ambivalent period of the early rising of Sirius, in which summer’s gifts ripen but, ‘hidden as it were behind the twittering of birds, the all-killing heat attains its climax on the mountain ridges transfigured in incandescence.’
Kerényi situates Apollo’s festival arrival within the Sirius period, reinforcing the star’s mythological role as a marker of life-death ambivalence in divine calendrics.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
When Sirius, the star of summer’s heat, blazed over the Cyclades and the people found no s—
Kerényi invokes Sirius as the stellar emblem of oppressive midsummer heat within the mythological biography of Aristaios, connecting astral symbolism to divine guardianship.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Sirius (Dog Star), 121
Edinger’s index entry identifies Sirius as the Dog Star within the Mysterium Coniunctionis commentary, noting its presence as a symbolic reference point in Jung’s alchemical-psychological framework.
, The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995aside
Dogs, killed at Argos, 108; and Aktaion, 112; dog star, see Sirius
Burkert’s index cross-references the dog star to Sirius within a sacrificial-ritual context, linking it to canine symbolism and the mythology of Aktaion in Greek sacrificial anthropology.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972aside