Thread by @serbiaireland

Thread (longish): Why was Orion seen by Ancient Greeks as a "the greatest hunter" armed with a cudgel (club)? And why do Bulgarians call Orion "cudgels (clubs)" and why do Serbs call Orion "Baba's (grandmother's) sticks" and all the stars "Baba's (grandmother's) cudgels (clubs)"?

Well to answer all these questions we have to look at Orionids, the most prolific meteor shower observable from Earth. It occurs during the period October 2nd – November 7th but it peaks between October 20th and October 22nd.

The meteors that streak across the sky are some of the fastest and brightest among meteor showers, because the Earth is hitting a stream of particles almost head on. They also often have long tails and exhibit distinctive colors before they burn up.

The meteorites are particles which come from Comet 1P/Halley, better known as Halley's Comet...

This famous comet swings by Earth every 75 to 76 years, and as it makes its way around the sun, it leaves behind a trail of comet debris which continues to move along the comet's orbit but a bit slower than the comet itself...

Earth's orbit around the sun crosses paths with the debris orbit twice a year: in May when we see it as the Eta Aquarids meteor shower and in October and November when we see it as the Orionids meteor shower...

The Orionids are named after the direction from which they appear to radiate, which is near the constellation Orion (The Hunter). The meteor shower's radiant (or point of origin) will be near Orion's club, slightly north of his left shoulder (the star Betelgeuse).

Ok, so this is where the "sticks" from Serbian name for Orion "Baba's (grandmother's) sticks" comes from...Orionid meteors do look like bright sticks...

They also look like arrows, so this is where the Orion bowman image comes from. He who shoots the arrows of light (meteors from the Orionid shower)...

Why is only Orion constellation with its meteor shower associated with a mythical, giant, mighty warrior hunter??? Orion is not the only constellation that has a meteor radiant point...

The Meteor Data Centre lists about 600 suspected meteor showers of which about 100 are well established and are associated with constellations, such as Lyrids, Perseids, Geminids, Leonids...

"Well the shape of Orion constellation does look like a silhouette of a warrior" I hear you say. Weeeell....Only when we see it with imaginary lines added to the actual visible stars. When we only see the stars, this is what they look like...

How did "this" become a warrior with a raised hand brandishing a cudgel (club)?

Well this is directly linked to the question why it is only Orion constellation which is known as "sticks" and "cudgels (clubs)"? And why do Serbs call all stars "cudgels (clubs)"? And what does grandmother has to do with all this?

Well to answer these questions we need to look at what the cudgel (club) is. This is a cudgel (club). It is a weapon used for smashing and killing the enemy or pray. It is a weapon of destruction used by killers. Which is what warriors and hunters are.

Orion was seen as a killer, destroyer. Now a harmless meteor shower, one of many identical harmless meteor showers, which produces few shooting stars, which admittedly do look like sticks, could not produce the image of a terrible giant killer armed with bronze cudgel (club)...

For that image to be created in people's mind, the things coming out of the Orionids radiant and rushing towards the earth, at 238,000 km/h, had to look like this:

Now this does look like a cudgel (club). This is a meteor which was seen burning over Glasgow in 2014. Luckily it was too small to reach the earth and cause any damage...

But this one was more like what people eventually started calling the "cudgels (clubs)" of Orion (the giant killer warrior, hunter). This is picture of the so called Chelyabinsk meteor impact.

Now this was a "20 meter" size rock, which came out of nowhere. Not something that would produce an image of a giant club wielding killer warrior/hunter. But definitely something that would produce an image of stars being actually cudgels (clubs) like in Serbian folklore...

Here is logical explanation for this: The stars are cudgels normally facing us head first, and it is their head that we can normally see in the sky. But every now and then, one of those cudgels (clubs) will fall from the sky, sometimes causing terrible destruction and death...

But what if at some point in the past, a similar or even bigger size meteor, or meteors, came out of the Orionid radiant?

They would all light up in the atmosphere and turn into giant burning reddish orange (the color of bronze) cudgels (clubs), and would eventually smash into the Earth causing catastrophic devastation and death...

And what if every year the same happened? Orion would appear on the horizon, and the next thing the giant cudgel(s)/club(s) of Orion would smash down on Earth?

Now that would definitely create the image of a giant warrior hunter, giant killer, armed with a giant bronze cudgel (club)...

The veneration of Orion, the obsession with it's rising over the horizon, that started during the early Bronze Age and quickly spread throughout the world, can only be explained by a panic fear that people felt towards this "greatest of warriors and hunters"...

But is it even possible that the Orionid meteors can ever be bigger than a speck? Well Orionid meteors are debris left behind the Halley's comet. According to the astronomers, Halley's comet has "probably been in its current orbit between 16,000 years to 200,000 years"...

This to me looks like they have no idea how old the comet actually is. Why this is important becomes obvious when we learn that based on the current estimates, the comet has so far lost 80-90% of it's mass...

But was that over 16,000 or 200,000 years? The shorter the life of the comet, the more intense the shedding of the comet material has been...

Now every time the icy comet gets close to the sun, it's heat starts violent termo chemical reactions which cause explosive evaporation and crumbling of the comet's nucleus. This is what causes the comet to develop a coma (comet tail), or atmosphere, up to 100,000 km across...

So the sudden evaporation of the surface of the comet can cause breaking of the bits of the comet surface which then fly off into the coma and are left behind as s trail of comet debris which is the cause of the Orionid meteor shower. How big can these comet crumbs be?

Well most of them are tiny, not more than dust. But sometimes, for so far not well understood reasons, much larger bits break off the surface of the comet. And sometimes comets just disintegrate...

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 is named after two German astronomers who discovered the comet in 1930. For many years, its orbit and brightness was not regarded as particularly significant...

However, in 1995 the comet became so bright that some astronomers thought that it was a new comet. 150 million miles from Earth, its bright display was far greater than anybody had expected...

Then…in 1996, another unexpected event occurred.

The comet appeared to have exploded into three pieces. Perhaps this disintegration was related to the continuing large brightening of the comet...

In 2000, the comet continued to not only defy expectations with its bright display; but also cause surprise at its continuing disintegration. In 2006, its disintegration was accelerating...

No one knows why this is happening. But imagine the debris left behind. Well you don't have to imagine it. Here it is, captured by Hubble telescope:

Imagine the devastating effect this debris would have if it hit Earth...Luckily, Earth does not cross the path of this comet. But it does cross the path or Halley's comet...

Based on the study of 46 apparitions of Halley's Comet taken from historical records, which then used computer simulation to predict the future of the Halley comet, "it will evaporate, or split in two, within the next few tens of thousands of years"...

Well then, it is entirely possible that at some point in the past, bits up to a half of the comet's size could have broken off and were left behind as the debris...The debris which continued to fly along the path of the Halley comet. The path which Earth crossed twice every year

Now that is quite scary. Scientists are saying that the current Halley's nucleus is relatively small: barely 15 kilometers long, 8 kilometers wide and perhaps 8 kilometers thick...

And the comet has so far lost 80-90% of its mass???? Which means that the bits that could have at some time broken off the surface of the comet could have been huge...

But do we actually have any proof that Halley's comet ever did shed big parts which could have caused the damage on Earth? Well it looks like we do...

In the article "Why Halley's Comet May Be Linked to Famine 1,500 Years Ago" on Live Science website in 2013, we can read that:

In 530 AD Halley's comet sheds some big bits which is seen from Earth as the comet being particularly bright. 6 years later, Earth plows through the debris and, not exactly enormous piece, smashes into the Earth's surface, causing a widespread destruction and a nuclear winter...

Is this why the appearance of the Halley's comet was considered as a bad omen? Especially if the comet was bright? Because our ancestors knew that every time a bright comet appeared, it was followed by a shower of deadly bronze cudgels (clubs)...

Now the destruction in the 6th century caused by a large meteor from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower shows that Halley comet did indeed in the past shed large parts. Is it possible that the Orionid shower was once also the source of the deadly "space cudgels (clubs)"???

When did the Halley comet disintegrate? Did that happen only once? Did the mighty killer Orion only once strike the earth with his mighty cudgel (club)?

Or was this a relatively common occurrence in the past, so common that it was actually expected to happen every year or every time Halley's comet came back?

I believe that the Sky Giant has been awake for a long time, but that he became particularly angry around the end of the 4th millennium, and that his anger lasted until the end of the 3rd millennium...

During this time we have evidence of catastrophic climate changes, sudden ends of civilisations and mass migrations of people...I believe that during this time, the Sky Giant hit Earth several times with his deadly fiery cudgels (clubs)...

This is why Sumerians called Orion "URU AN-NA" meaning not "the light of heaven" as we can read on the Internet, but "the fire of heaven, the fiery object from heaven" because "ùru" in Sumerian means "watch fire; light; glowing, luminous object"..

The image of raging Orion with his fiery club was so terrifying that it has become the archetype for all the future Sky Gods in Eurasia and North Africa. No wonder the Egyptians called Sah, Orion, "The father of Gods"...

So we have answers to most of our original questions.

Serbs called Orion "sticks" because small Orionid meteors look like sticks when they enter Earth's atmosphere.

Bulgarians called Orion cudgels (clubs) and Serbs called all the stars cudgels (clubs) because large meteors entering the Earth's atmosphere look like giant cudgels (clubs) and these people preserved clear memory of these events in their language.

Orion is seen as the might hunter armed with a giant bronze cudgel (club), because Orionid meteor shower, whose radiant is next to the "imagined" Orion's club, in the past produced large number of large meteors which looked like terrible burning bronze cudgels (clubs)...

But why "grandmother's cudgels (clubs)"? Meteors which fall out of the sky are giant rocks and some bits of those rocks actually survived the meteor impacts and were found by the people...

And people being logical beings concluded that the giant burning cudgels, giant burning sticks that fell from the sky must have been made of stone...

In Serbian, the word "baba" used to mean mother, grandmother, midwife, any woman that has given birth, but today mostly means grandmother. So "babine tojage" today means "grandmother's cudgels (clubs)". Which makes no sense...

However the word "baba" in the past also meant stone, rock, crag, boulder, mountain, Earth, Mother Earth, The Mother Goddess which was seen as a stony being which gives birth to all life...

And it is this second meaning of the word "baba" which makes "Baba's cudgels (clubs)" suddenly make a lot of sense. The meaning of the expression "babine tojage" (stars) becomes "stone cudgels (clubs)" and the meaning of "babini štapi" (Orion) becomes "stone sticks"...

Stone cudgels, clubs, sticks, like the ones Orion threw from the sky...