Ramus

Ramus, The Apple, is an addition to the early modern asterism Cerberus in Hercules.

1. REDIRECT Hercules

Material drawn from "Medieval and Early Modern Europe" discussion on Hercules:

Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Ramus et Cerberus in Senex (1721/2), thanks to Daniel Crouch and Ian Ridpath.

Traditionally, Hercules carries a lion's skin and a club. Yet, in Early Modern Europe, all sorts of variants occurred: instead of the skin that was supposed to protect him, he then was depicted with branches of apples or instead of branches with a three-headed snake in his hand.

The creature with the three heads was typically labelled "Cerberus" although the ancient Kerberos/ Cerberus had dog-heads and not snake-heads.

The branch with the apples resembled the myth according to which he stole the "golden apples" as one of his celebrated deeds.

John Senex even labelled the apples, as Ian Ridpath points out:

Hercules holds Ramus, the apple branch, and Cerberus, the three-headed monster, in his outstretched hand, as depicted by the English cartographer John Senex (1678–1740) on his chart of the northern celestial hemisphere, Stellarum Fixarum Hemisphaerium Boreale, published 1721/2. This chart was based on the pirated edition of John Flamsteed's unfinished star catalogue that had been published by Edmond Halley in 1712. Senex called the combined figure Ramus Cerberus, and it appeared again on his planisphere of the northern sky issued posthumously in 1746. Johann Bode adopted the combined figure on his Uranographia atlas of 1801 but changed its name to Cerberus et Ramus, and that is the name by which it became most widely known.

Bode's map in the Uranographia (1801) is available in the digital collection of ETH Zurich.