Hyrai

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Hyrai is a toponym mentioned in Homer's catalogue of the ships. There a childless king "Hyreus", who had prayed to the gods for a son. Zeus, Poseidon and Hermes, visitors in disguise responded by urinating on a bull's hide and burying it in the earth which produced a child. He was named Orion—as if "of the urine"— after the unusual event.^[1]

Like some other archaic names of Greek cities, such as Athenai or Mycenae, Hyrai is a plural form: its name once had evoked the place of "the sisters of the beehive". According to Hesychius, the Cretan word hyron meant 'swarm of bees' or 'beehive' (Kerenyi 1976 pp 42-3). Through his "beehive" birthplace Orion is linked to Potnia, the Minoan-Mycenaean "Mistress" older than Demeter—who was herself sometimes called "the pure Mother Bee". Winged, armed with toxin, creators of the fermentable honey (see mead), seemingly parthenogenetic in their immortal hive, bees functioned as emblems of other embodiments of the Great Mother: Cybele, Rhea the Earth Mother, and the archaic Artemis as honored at Ephesus. Pindar remembered that the Pythian pre-Olympic priestess of Delphi remained "the Delphic bee" long after Apollo had usurped the ancient oracle and shrine. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo acknowledges that Apollo's gift of prophecy first came to him from three bee-maidens.