Snake worship she sold herself to a man named Gonga no Tayu, who (unbeknownst to Sayohime) intended to sacrifice her to the snake deity of his village in place of his own daughter. When presented to the snake, Sayohime read from the Lotus sutra, enabling the deity to achieve enlightenment and shed its monstrous form. The deity then returned Sayohime to the care of her mother. In Australia, various Aboriginal mythologies tell of a huge python, known by a variety of names but universally referred to as the Rainbow Serpent, that was said to have created the landscape, embodied the spirit of
Stars named after people with them in some way. The second, somewhat more obscurely, are those named after an individual but without explicitly making this clear. There is a small group of stars whose common names honour individuals. Many of these were highly significant in some way when discovered, usually through having some unusual characteristic. Some stars were given names that were disguised names of individuals, which names subsequently appeared in star catalogues and thus into more general usage. The earliest noted example was Sualocin and Rotanev, which names have now been approved by the IAU WGSN (see above). More recently, during the Apollo