CHAPDISC: DH, EPILOGUE

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186083

Bird wrote:
> I'm amazed in all this analyzing of what the name *could* mean that no one's thought about the implication of the myth of Scorpius. The scorpion was sent to kill the popular hunter and hero - Orion. (The whys vary.)
> 
> Orion, aside from being the name of the patriarch of the Black family and the husband-cousin to Wahlburga is also the constellation where the star Bellatrix can be found.
> 
> So... Draco named his son after the thing that killed the namesake of his Great Uncle and Aunt.
> 
> Wikipedia is your friend, people!
>
Carol responds:

Yes, and Draco is named after the constellation Draco, which represents (according to the Greek myth, anyway) the dragon that killed Cadmus's men. Cadmus in turn killed the dragon and sowed its teeth to create a new army. Not much connection with Draco Malfoy that I can see--just the continuation of the Black family tradition of naming its children after constellations. (Unlike Sirius, whose name reflects his doglike loyalty to James Potter and his Animagus form, Draco probably wouldn't have a dragon Animagus--or Scorpius a scorpion Animagus--if they learned that form of magic. (As for the "popular hunter and hero," Orion, at least one version of the myth has Gaia wanting the scorpion to kill him because he had boasted that he could kill all the wild animals of the world and was in the process of carrying out his boast! Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but Bellatrix merely means "woman warrior" or Amazon. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm unaware of any myth in which Gaia's scorpion kills an Amazon.)

On a sidenote, Draco and his wife (Daphne Greengrass's sister, Astoria, according to JKR) seem to be blending the Black family tradition of constellation or star names for children with the general Pure-Blood tradition of giving boys Latin names ending in -us. (It's not, however, the Malfoy family tradition since Lucius's father was Abraxas, a transliteration of the Greek name  with the consonants in the last syllable transposed. No telling how the cut-and-pasted Greek name will show up in Yahoo, but the correct transliteration is Abrasax. Interesting stuff on this name can be found here (I can't vouch for its accuracy since monstropedia seems to be an extension of Wikipedia): 

http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Abraxas

Wonder whether Abraxas' family knew what they were naming their son after!)

To get back to Scorpius, his middle name (again, according to JKR) is Hyperion, so in addition to a constellation, he's named after a Titan (incidentally, a son of Gaia and the father of Helios, the Sun; Eos, the dawn; and Selene, the Moon). Possibly the Greengrass family had a tradition of naming their children after figures in Greek mythology--Daphne, named for a nymph turned into a laurel tree, certainly qualifies. Astoria is not a real name (unless you count the Waldorf Astoria!). It could be a variant of the rare English masculine name Astor, meaning hawk (which ruins my theory), but apparently the name appears as "Asteria" on the Black family tree (Asteria, which is appropriately derived from "aster" [star] was the name of an obscure female Titan). If this source is accurate, she was the goddess of oracles and falling stars: 

http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisAsteria.html

("Apollon," mentioned in the little article, is, of course, the Greek form of Apollo.)

Carol, who prefers to see hope for Scorpius (and the Slytherins in general) regardless of the implications of the (highly varied) myths surrounding Scorpio, especially given the Greengrass connection