Chamaeleon

This constellation, Chamaeleon, is adjacent to Octans which contains the South Pole. The name 'chameleon' means 'Earth lion', or 'lion of the earth', and is derived from the Greek words chamai (on the ground, on the earth) and leon (lion).

Main features of the chameleon: Skin changes color to camouflage itself. The eyes can move in different directions simultaneously, can rotate to observe two different objects simultaneously giving a full 360-degree arc of vision around their body. Long tongues, sometimes longer than their own body length, with suction cap at the tip.

Chamaeleon, chamae + lion, the prefix chamae comes from the Indo-European root *dhghem- 'Earth'. Derivatives: bridegroom, (bride-groom, from Old English guma, man), chthonic (Greek khthon, Earth), autochthon (one of the earliest known inhabitants of a place; an aborigine. An indigenous plant or animal), chamaephyte (a low-growing perennial plant whose dormant overwintering buds are borne at or just above the surface of the ground), chameleon, chamomile, germander, (these words from Greek khamai, on the ground), humble, humiliate, humility, humus¹, omerta, exhume, inhume, transhumance, (these words from Latin humus, earth, earthling), homage, hombre¹, hominid, homo¹, homunculus, ombre, bonhomie, homicide, (these words from Latin homo, human being, man), human, humane, (from Latin humanus, human), chernozem (Russian for 'black earth', chërnyi, black + zemi, earth), sierozem, zemstvo, (these words from Old Russian zemi, land, earth), zamindar (from Persian zamin, earth, land). [Pokorny ghdem- 414. Watkins] The 'homo' of 'homo sapiens' is a Latin word meaning 'human being, man'. The 'homo' of 'homo sapiens' has no connection with the 'homo-' of homosexual.

Humans, or human beings, are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens (Latin: 'wise man' or 'knowing man', modern humans) in the family Hominidae (the great apes) [2].

The theoi chthonioi, were the gods of the nether or underworld. 

"The word 'human' itself is from Latin humanus, an adjective cognate to homo, both derived from Proto-Indo-European language dhghem- 'earth'. Compare Hebrew adam, meaning 'human', cognate to adamah, meaning 'ground'. (And compare Latin humus, meaning 'soil'.) Both homo/humanus/humus and adam/adamah share a conjectured Nostratic superroot, ad-ham-" [3]. "Adam was, as his prototype Atum in Egypt, the first formation in the worlds above of the mind-in-matter combination. He was the archetypal model in ethereal mold of the earthly man to be" [4].

The word chameleon can be resolved into 'the human lion' - 'the humus lion'.

Speculation

The Great Sphinx, at Giza (the largest and most famous of the sphinxes), was seen as a representation of Hu, with the body of a lion and the head of a woman, though other sphinxes had the head of a man. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Hu was the deification of the word [or logos] spoken to create existence. In Egyptian mythology, Hu is the deification of the first word, the word of creation, that Atum was said to have exclaimed upon ejaculating, in his masturbatory act of creating the Ennead [5].

The Greeks also had a sphinx that sat outside of Thebes and asked a riddle of all travelers who passed by. The Sphinx of Greece would strangle anyone who could not answer the riddle. The riddle was: "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Oedipus was able to solve the riddle, he answered; "A man [human], who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and uses a walking stick in old age".

© Anne Wright 2008.