The blue and red jackals and the stars

The Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille features a crayfish and two dogs. The constellation Cancer was normally portrayed as a crayfish in the past, and the two dogs would then represent Canis Major and Canis Minor, both of which are in the region of the sky assigned to Cancer.

My recent post "The red and blue jackals" drew my attention to the color of the two dogs, and I realized that a blue canine could well be a representation of the principal star in Canis Major -- Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest and most obviously blue star in the sky. Sure enough, the Tarot de Marseille always portrays the blue dog as the larger of the two -- Canis Major.

It would be natural to infer, then, that the smaller, pink or buff dog represents Canis Minor and its principal star, Procyon. The problem is that Procyon isn't red. The red star close to Sirius in Betelgeuse -- the third member of the Winter Triangle asterism -- but Betelgeuse is part of Orion and has nothing to do with dogs. Procyon is very nearly white, and much closer to Sirius than to Betelgeuse in color.

Doing a bit of searching on the Internet, I found a few possibly relevant facts. The first is that several cultures have called Sirius the jackal star. I quote the following from a notice in the November 1883 issue of Popular Science, which ties Sirius not only to the jackal but specifically to the jackal as an animal in Indian fables.

The Jackal, the Fox-Fables, and the Dog-Star. -- Herr O. Keller, in a paper on "The Jackal in Antiquity," urges that the Western nations, who had foxes but no jackals, borrowed the traits ascribed to jackals, in Oriental fables, with the fables, and transferred them to their foxes. Thus the Grecian foxes were endowed with the attributes of two animals, and the most curious fox-fables of Aesop are in their origin Indian jackal-fables. Some of Aesop's fables represent the fox as the follower and servant of the lion, which he is not known to be in any sense. The jackal, however, is in the habit of following the lion at a respectful distance, and lives on what he can pick up from the deserted repasts of the king of beasts. This trait was observed by the ancient Indians, and it was a natural result of the observation that their vivid imaginations, discovering royal prerogatives in the lion, should endow his follower with the qualities of a minister and counselor, and make him to assist his majesty by using in his behalf the qualities of slyness and cunning in which the royal beast was deficient. The Greeks substituted foxes for jackals because they knew nothing about them, and their foxes came nearer than any other animal to answering the descriptions of them. The transfer was made easier by the gradual development of the fables from simple nature-stories into moral lessons, in the course of which absolute truth to nature grew less essential, and the representation of abstract qualities under purely conventional masks became more prominent. The incongruous association by the Greeks of the supposed evil influences of Sirius with the harmless dog are susceptible of a similar explanation. The Chinese, however, who also attributed evil qualities to the dog-star, called it the jackal-star, and appropriately; for as the heat and drought of which it is the forerunner are destructive to the crops, so likewise are the jackals, which make their home in the fields, and are constantly running through them in gangs, destroying myriads of plants, in search of their food. To the Egyptians, Sirius was also the jackal-star, but foreboded good, for it appeared just before the time of the inundation. The Mesopotamians also recognized in it a forerunner of beneficent inundations, and gave it the name of the dog, an animal which they held in high esteem. The Greeks borrowed the Mesopotamian name, and kept the Chinese idea, which harmonized well with the character of their own dog-days. The origin of the dog-star has been associated by some other writers with the idea that Sirius, the chief of the stars, was the shepherd-dog to the host of heavenly sheep, represented by the other stars.

The second thing I found was this 1995 article by R. C. Ceragioli in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, called "The Debate Concerning 'Red' Sirius." It begins thus:

A long-standing question in the history of astronomy concerns whether Sirius, the Dog Star (α CMa), could have changed its intrinsic colour since antiquity. Half a dozen Greek, Roman and Near Easter sources refer to Sirius as "reddish", whereas since at least the Renaissance it has always shone a brilliant bluish white. So the question has been posed: could Sirius have changed from reddish to white since Antiquity?

At first sight, this might seem a reasonable possibility: stars do evolve and suffer various kinds of changes during their lifetimes. Could these ancient references to Sirius's redness be evidence for an evolutionary change during the historical period? Most astronomers consider this unlikely, because stellar evolution generally takes eons, not a mere 2,000 years, to produce significant results. Accordingly, they usually reject the ancient evidence for 'red' Sirius out of hand. Yet that evidence is strong . . .

I haven't yet read the whole article, but the idea that Sirius somehow changed from looking red to looking blue is an intriguing one. Paired with the idea that Sirius was originally the jackal-star, it suggests a possible meaning of the Blue Jackal fable, in which an ordinary (red-brown) jackal is dyed blue.