Fixed Stars

The fuller picture

The name is a comparison rather than a claim. Stars do move, and precession carries the whole sphere along the ecliptic at roughly a degree every seventy-two years, which is slow enough that any two of them keep the same relationship to each other for a working lifetime. That slowness is also why they are handled differently from planets. There is no application and no separation to read, so the only contact traditional practice takes is a conjunction, and the allowance is very small. Lilly sets it himself in his table of fortitudes, where the entry reads "In Partill conjunction with Cor Leonis" — partile, meaning the star and the planet stand in the same degree of the same sign. That is tighter than an orb of a degree or two, and deliberately so: it is close to a coincidence of position rather than an approach.

Each star carries a nature written as a pair of planets, which is the Ptolemaic convention and the thing that actually tells you how to read it. Saturn or Mars in the pair pulls the reading towards harm, Jupiter or Venus towards benefit, and Mercury takes the colour of whatever it is paired with. Regulus comes through as Mars with Jupiter, Spica as Venus with Mercury, Algol as Saturn with Jupiter and with the worst reputation of any star in the tradition. Where the pair carries both a benefic and a malefic the convention runs out of road, and the honest reading is that such a star says nothing you can defend either way. Where an authority names the star outright, the naming wins: Lilly puts Regulus and Spica in his table of fortitudes at six and five, and names Antares among his violent stars in the same book, although its pair is the same Mars with Jupiter that Regulus carries.

It is worth being straight about how much weight this carries in practice, because the answer is not much. Across the twenty-one chapters of the source material behind these pages, a named star conjunct a significator turns up three times. One is a rule in the friendship material: the south node in the eleventh house, or the ruler of the eleventh conjunct the south node, or that ruler close to one of the violent stars — named there as Caput Algol, Oculus Tauri, Serpentarius and the Chelae — gives a friend who is deceitful, and the reading is stronger where one of those stars sits in the eleventh near its cusp. The second is a worked chart in which the ruler of the eleventh sits on Algol and the hoped-for thing is read as arriving in its opposite form. The third has the ruler of the first on Scheat, read as a life lived through one wreck after another. That is the entire harvest, and it makes the honest summary a modest one: check the stars, take them as colour, and never build a verdict on one.

Two cautions follow from the first paragraph. Positions have to be computed for the date of the question rather than copied from a printed list, because a table drawn up in 1647 puts Algol more than five degrees behind where it stands now, and five degrees is several times the orb. And a star's traditional nature and the story usually told about it are not the same thing. Several of the brightest carry a "great honour, then a fall" gloss that says more about the moral habits of the sources than about anything a chart is asserting.