Balford Henry ANYONE GROWING up in rural Jamaica before the days of high-tech, and who did not experience either the magic or omen of the stars, must either have been a living dead or just plainly slept too much. The stars and what they meant, bore stories and legends of achievements, disasters and great superstitions. They directed fishermen when to get up and what to expect on the road to their canoes. They told farmers when and what to plant. They inspired duppy stories and tales of romance in the grassy outdoors. And they became excuses for laziness or sheer ineptitude.
Chief among the stars of wonder and ignorance was the morning star. It shone with great brilliance and daring, and occupied a position of fear among many, especially young men and women in the districts of the south. To make matters worse, the absence of radios, television or other technological gadgets of the time, allowed minds to prey on the suspicious and ignorant. This produced all kinds of excuses for inaction and convenience.
In my home district, for example, rising with the morning star meant getting up around four a.m. to help round up cows for milking, so as to catch the milk truck passing through at seven o' clock. To a student home from boarding school for summer holidays, this meant a sentence worse than death and would lead, as it often did in my case, to spending my summer holidays not in St. Elizabeth but in Kingston where there are no milch cows.
Summer and the morning star also meant the presence of severely hot days, which in some other cultures of the world were often described in written form as "the dog days of summer". Some claimed them to be days "not fit for a dog" or weather in which dogs usually go mad. Those unusually hot days were always associated with droughts, plagues, and madness; or as in our case, with 'ginnalship'.
MODERN SCIENCE
Thanks to modern science, we can now put most of those astronomical distortions behind us. According to some recent information on astronomy, that bright morning star known as the 'Dog Star' or scientifically as Sirius, marks the time of the year when the sun's heat is thought to be the greatest. Early Egyptians, it is reported, regarded its appearance as a warning to those who lived along the Nile river. It meant the coming of floods which produced either fertility or disaster. Priests in their temples, for example, regarded the rising of Sirius as of special importance. Since they were the calendar keepers of those days, the priests bore special responsibility for interpreting the omen of the dog star.
Information is that this year, Sirius will appear most prominently to the naked eye sometime between late July and late Fall, without any of the earlier preconceptions which it once presaged. It just happens to be the star of the constellation Canis Major which is Latin for 'Greater Dog'. According to a celestial handbook, other names for it include "the sparkling one" or "the scorching one". It usually bears a brilliant white with a tinge of blue, except when the air is unsteady and it appears to flicker or splinter with the various colours of the rainbow. That might explain what one member of the district once described the morning star as having "pain-a-belly". At a distance of about eight light-years away, Sirius is the fifth nearest known star. Among those easily seen by the naked eye it is believed to be the nearest of all, save for Alpha Centauri.
So there. Will all you young guys stop telling those young girls that if they do not go to bed with you before the rise of the next morning star, they will end up as mules. "Nutten nuh guh suh".
The Bottom Line: Husband to wife ---- Either I move and ruin your life, or stay and ruin mine. Your choice.
Desmond Henry is a marketing consultant formerly based in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth, now resident in north Florida.
